Publishing a blog on GitHub using Pelican

Probably not the cleanest way... and totally inspired from Setting up a blog with Pelican and GitHub Pages

GitHub allows to store websites for your project or your user account. This post gives a rough description of how to :

• setup a simple blog using Pelican
• make CircleCI automatically generate and deploy your pages
• using git for source version control and GitHub for hosting source and the built pages

Each of these is quite clearly described over multiple posts and articles. The basic idea consists in :

• creating the adequate repository like username.github.io with two branches master and source.
• setting up accounts on CircleCI and GitHub for access rights (see Adding deployments keys)
• writing the adequate circle.yml that will command the build using Pelican and push the result to the master branch of the GitHub repository
• pushing website source to the source branch and see the magic

ghp-import can come in handy to import pages on gh-pages or master.

Here I wrote this simple build.sh that is called in the deployment stage of circle.yml. That seems to do the job :

pelican content -o /tmp/output
git config --local user.name pluralparallel
git config --local user.email pluralparallel@circleci.com
git checkout master
git reset --hard 7ed15ee136 # back to the initial commit
git push origin master --force
mv LICENSE /tmp
rm -rf *
mv /tmp/LICENSE .
cp -rf /tmp/output/* .
git add --all
git commit -m 'Update documentation'
git push origin master

Now circle.yml :

machine:
  python:
    version: 2.7.6
general:
  branches:
    ignore:
      - master

dependencies:
  pre:
     - pip install --upgrade pip
     - pip install --upgrade setuptools
     - pip install pelican markdown ghp-import

test:
   override:
      - "true"

deployment:
  production:
     branch: source
     commands:
       - ./build.sh

Now each commit on the source branch will trigger Pelican on CircleCI and the resulting build is pushed to the master branch and get visible on http://username.github.io.

There should be a much cleaner way to manage the git work.

Now blogging from anywhere just requires these few steps:

virtualenv .
. bin/activate
pip install pelican markdown
git clone https://github.com/username/username.github.io.git
git checkout source
pelican content # to check out the result before publication
./develop_server.sh start # open a browser at http://localhost:8000
# add/modify contents and commit/push

References links:

• Setting up a blog with Pelican and GitHub Pages