Powered By Pelican

Introduction

This blog was created as a place for me to technical writeups of things I have done that may be of interest to others. I suppose a Hello World! is in order!

In addition, it was created as a learning experiment with github actions, github pages, and pelican. The following is a writeup that details how I used those tools in order to build this website.

I would like to suggest going to view the README.md on github which details the process for developing the webite. This page is the published version of the output created in the main branch here.

https://github.com/JesseDMoore1994/jessemoore.dev

Pelican

Pelican is a pretty neat tool, you can give it a tree of content and it renders it into a statically built website.

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➜  jessemoore.dev git:(main) ✗ tree content
content
├── pages
│   └── about.rst
└── pelican
    └── powered-by-pelican.rst

Boy that sure is a lot of folders, what do they do?

  • The pages folder is used to host pages that are not directly blog posts, think like contact info, resume, other
    platforms, etc.
  • The pelican folder is a category folder to host articles, this article you are reading currently is in that category.

In the future I will likely be adding a folder for each new category, an images folder to store all my images, and more.

While I am working on the project incrementally, be it adjusting theme or adding new articles, I use the following command in order to build and display the render locally:

make clean && make output && make host

This is the simple makefile that I just use to do some housekeeping.

# [main x] {} jessemoore.dev cat Makefile
VENV?=venv
VENV_ACTIVATE=. $(VENV)/bin/activate
PYTHON=$(VENV)/bin/python3
OUTPUT_FOLDER=$

$(VENV)/bin/activate: requirements.txt
        python3 -m venv $(VENV)
        ./$(VENV)/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt

output: $(VENV)/bin/activate
        . $(VENV)/bin/activate && pelican content

host:
        . $(VENV)/bin/activate && pelican -l output

clean:
        rm -rf output

clean-all:
        rm -rf venv output

.PHONY: clean clean-all host

This way I can view what my changes look like before checking them into main.

Note:
To get the themeing displayed locally I have to uncomment the RELATIVE_URLS=True variable in pelicanconf.py. I comment it back out before I push to main so everything links correctly in pages.

Deployment

I deploy this website automatically to github pages vis github actions from gh-pages-pelican-action. Luckily there was already an existing action that did exactly what I wanted it to with just a few tweaks before using it. I just had create a config file for github to wrap it around my project. I used the config file from example project for gh-pages-pelican-action as the base for this one.

➜  jessemoore.dev git:(main) ✗ cat .github/workflows/pelican.yml
name: Pelican site CI

on:
  # Trigger the workflow on push or pull request,
  # but only for the master branch
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  build:

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - name: Checkout source repository
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
      with:
        submodules: true
    - uses: JesseDMoore1994/gh-pages-pelican-action@0.1.10
      env:
        GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}}

By doing this, whenever I submit code to the main branch of my repository, the code is checked out, then the action at version 0.1.10 on my github is used to deploy the output to the gh-pages branch.

Make sure to follow the instructions for setting up github pages on your repository.

How did you get a domain?

I use google domains to redirect traffic from https://jessemoore.dev to https://jessedmoore1994.github.io/jessemoore.dev. Check out google domains here. I also have email forwarding for the domain, so please shoot me one if you feel the need using jesse@jessemoore.dev.

Creating this article!

To create this article, I created the following rst called pelican.rst to the pelican category folder mentioned earlier. Thats it! One article down! 😊

Creating non-blog content!

You can create non-blog content too, I created the following rst called about.rst in the pages folder. I will soon be updating it to include more about myself, post socials, etc. I also want to create a page to host my resume.