Tips¶
Here are some tips about Pelican that you might find useful.
Custom 404 Pages¶
When a browser requests a resource that the web server cannot find, the web server usually displays a generic “File not found” (404) error page that can be stark and unsightly. One way to provide an error page that matches the theme of your site is to create a custom 404 page, such as this Markdown-formatted example:
Title: Not Found
Status: hidden
Save_as: 404.html
The requested item could not be located. Perhaps you might want to check
the [Archives](/archives.html)?
The next step is to configure your web server to display this custom page
instead of its default 404 page. For Nginx, add the following to your
configuration file’s location
block:
error_page 404 /404.html;
For Apache:
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
Publishing to GitHub¶
GitHub Pages offer an easy and convenient way to publish Pelican sites. There are two types of GitHub Pages: Project Pages and User Pages. Pelican sites can be published as both Project Pages and User Pages.
Project Pages¶
To publish a Pelican site as a Project Page you need to push the content of
the output
dir generated by Pelican to a repository’s gh-pages
branch
on GitHub.
The excellent ghp-import, which can
be installed with pip
, makes this process really easy.
For example, if the source of your Pelican site is contained in a GitHub repository, and if you want to publish that Pelican site in the form of Project Pages to this repository, you can then use the following:
$ pelican content -o output -s pelicanconf.py
$ ghp-import output
$ git push origin gh-pages
The ghp-import output
command updates the local gh-pages
branch with
the content of the output
directory (creating the branch if it doesn’t
already exist). The git push origin gh-pages
command updates the remote
gh-pages
branch, effectively publishing the Pelican site.
Note
The github
target of the Makefile (and the gh_pages
task of the Fabfile)
created by the pelican-quickstart
command
publishes the Pelican site as Project Pages, as described above.
Note
ghp-import on Windows
Until ghp-import Pull Request #25
is accepted, you will need to install a custom build of ghp-import:
pip install https://github.com/chevah/ghp-import/archive/win-support.zip
User Pages¶
To publish a Pelican site in the form of User Pages, you need to push the
content of the output
dir generated by Pelican to the master
branch of
your <username>.github.io
repository on GitHub.
Again, you can take advantage of ghp-import
:
$ pelican content -o output -s pelicanconf.py
$ ghp-import output
$ git push git@github.com:elemoine/elemoine.github.io.git gh-pages:master
The git push
command pushes the local gh-pages
branch (freshly updated
by the ghp-import
command) to the elemoine.github.io
repository’s
master
branch on GitHub.
Note
To publish your Pelican site as User Pages, feel free to adjust the
github
target of the Makefile.
Custom 404 Pages¶
GitHub Pages will display the custom 404 page described above, as noted in the relevant GitHub docs.
Extra Tips¶
Tip #1:
To automatically update your Pelican site on each commit, you can create
a post-commit hook. For example, you can add the following to
.git/hooks/post-commit
:
pelican content -o output -s pelicanconf.py && ghp-import output && git push origin gh-pages
Tip #2:
To use a custom domain with
GitHub Pages, you need to put the domain of your site (e.g.,
blog.example.com
) inside a CNAME
file at the root of your site. To do
this, create the content/extra/
directory and add a CNAME
file to it.
Then use the STATIC_PATHS
setting to tell Pelican to copy this file to your
output directory. For example:
STATIC_PATHS = ['images', 'extra/CNAME']
EXTRA_PATH_METADATA = {'extra/CNAME': {'path': 'CNAME'},}
Note: use forward slashes, /
, even on Windows.
Hint
You can also use the EXTRA_PATH_METADATA
mechanism
to place a favicon.ico
or robots.txt
at the root of any site.
How to add YouTube or Vimeo Videos¶
The easiest way is to paste the embed code of the video from these sites directly into your source content.
Alternatively, you can also use Pelican plugins like liquid_tags
,
pelican_youtube
, or pelican_vimeo
to embed videos in your content.
Moreover, markup languages like reST and Markdown have plugins that let you embed videos in the markup. You can use reST video directive for reST or mdx_video plugin for Markdown.