Make a static website with Pelican

What is Pelican?

According to the website, Pelican is a static website generator written in Python programming language. Pelican parse documents in Markdown, reStructuredText and AsciiDoc file formats.

Features

• Articles (e.g., blog posts) and pages (e.g., “About”, “Projects”, “Contact”)
• Comments, via an external service (Disqus). If you prefer to have more control over your comment data, self-hosted comments are another option. Check out the Pelican Plugins repository for more details.
• Theming support (themes are created using Jinja2 templates)
• Publication of articles in multiple languages
• Atom/RSS feeds
• Code syntax highlighting
• Import from WordPress, Dotclear, or RSS feeds
• Integration with external tools: Twitter, Google Analytics, etc. (optional)
• Fast rebuild times thanks to content caching and selective output writing

Requeriments.

• Python 2.7.x or 3.3+
• pip (package manager from python)

  For this article, we are using python 3.6

Installing Pelican.

$ sudo pip install pelican

Installing markdown support (if you intend use it.)

$ sudo pip install markdown

QuickStart

Create a project.

  $ mkdir myblog
  $ pelican-quickstart

  > Where do you want to create your new web site? [.]
  > What will be the title of this web site? My personal Blog
  > Who will be the author of this web site? Author Name
  > What will be the default language of this web site? [Spanish] EN
  > Do you want to specify a URL prefix? e.g., http://example.com   (Y/n) Y
  > What is your URL prefix? (see above example; no trailing slash) >   http://blog.example.com
  > Do you want to enable article pagination? (Y/n) y
  > How many articles per page do you want? [10]
  > What is your time zone? [Europe/Paris] Mexico/General
  > Do you want to generate a Fabfile/Makefile to automate generation and    publishing? (Y/n) n
  > Do you want an auto-reload & simpleHTTP script to assist with theme and site development? (Y/n) n
  Done. Your new project is available at /home/ficovh/pelican-projects/myblog

Create the first article.

  Title: My First posts
  Date: 2017-11-09 18:24
  Category: Articles

  This is my first post in the Pelican Static website generator.

The previous example was written in Markdown file format, save it as:

 ~/pelican-projects/myblog/content/first-post.md

Generate the site and Launching the preview.

    $ pelican -o output content
      Done: Processed 1 article, 0 drafts, 0 pages and 0 hidden pages in 0.27 seconds.
    $ cd ~/pelican-projects/myblog/output
    $ python -m http.server
      Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 (http://0.0.0.0:8000/)

Settings.

The pelicanconf.py file contain the general settings for the website, feel free to modify and add new variables.

The pelican-themes in Github contain several themes for pelican, you can use a specific template by using the variable THEME as follow in the pelicanconf.py file

  THEME='pelican-bootstrap3'

Conclusions

Pelican is a simple and powerful static website generator, very fast and stable. Personally, I'm using pelican for more than two years ago. Enjoy your new blog.