Settings¶

Pelican is configurable thanks to a settings file you can pass to the command line:

pelican content -s path/to/your/pelicanconf.py

If you used the pelican-quickstart command, your primary settings file will be named pelicanconf.py by default.

Note

When experimenting with different settings (especially the metadata ones) caching may interfere and the changes may not be visible. In such cases disable caching with LOAD_CONTENT_CACHE = False or use the --ignore-cache command-line switch.

Settings are configured in the form of a Python module (a file). There is an example settings file available for reference.

All the setting identifiers must be set in all-caps, otherwise they will not be processed. Setting values that are numbers (5, 20, etc.), booleans (True, False, None, etc.), dictionaries, or tuples should not be enclosed in quotation marks. All other values (i.e., strings) must be enclosed in quotation marks.

Unless otherwise specified, settings that refer to paths can be either absolute or relative to the configuration file.

The settings you define in the configuration file will be passed to the templates, which allows you to use your settings to add site-wide content.

Here is a list of settings for Pelican:

Basic settings¶

USE_FOLDER_AS_CATEGORY = True: When you don’t specify a category in your post metadata, set this setting to True, and organize your articles in subfolders, the subfolder will become the category of your post. If set to False, DEFAULT_CATEGORY will be used as a fallback.

DEFAULT_CATEGORY = 'misc': The default category to fall back on.

DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU = True: Whether to display pages on the menu of the template. Templates may or may not honor this setting.

DISPLAY_CATEGORIES_ON_MENU = True: Whether to display categories on the menu of the template. Templates may or not honor this setting.

DOCUTILS_SETTINGS = {}: Extra configuration settings for the docutils publisher (applicable only to reStructuredText). See Docutils Configuration settings for more details.

DELETE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY = False: Delete the output directory, and all of its contents, before generating new files. This can be useful in preventing older, unnecessary files from persisting in your output. However, this is a destructive setting and should be handled with extreme care.

OUTPUT_RETENTION = []

A list of filenames that should be retained and not deleted from the output directory. One use case would be the preservation of version control data.

Example:

OUTPUT_RETENTION = [".hg", ".git", ".bzr"]

JINJA_ENVIRONMENT = {'trim_blocks': True, 'lstrip_blocks': True}: A dictionary of custom Jinja2 environment variables you want to use. This also includes a list of extensions you may want to include. See Jinja Environment documentation.

JINJA_FILTERS = {}

A dictionary of custom Jinja2 filters you want to use. The dictionary should map the filtername to the filter function.

Example:

JINJA_FILTERS = {'urlencode': urlencode_filter}

See Jinja custom filters documentation.

LOG_FILTER = []

A list of tuples containing the logging level (up to warning) and the message to be ignored.

Example:

LOG_FILTER = [(logging.WARN, 'TAG_SAVE_AS is set to False')]

READERS = {}

A dictionary of file extensions / Reader classes for Pelican to process or ignore.

For example, to avoid processing .html files, set:

READERS = {'html': None}

To add a custom reader for the foo extension, set:

READERS = {'foo': FooReader}

IGNORE_FILES = ['.#*']: A list of glob patterns. Files and directories matching any of these patterns will be ignored by the processor. For example, the default ['.#*'] will ignore emacs lock files, and ['__pycache__'] would ignore Python 3’s bytecode caches.

MARKDOWN = {...}

Extra configuration settings for the Markdown processor. Refer to the Python Markdown documentation’s Options section for a complete list of supported options. The extensions option will be automatically computed from the extension_configs option.

Defaults to:

MARKDOWN = {
    'extension_configs': {
        'markdown.extensions.codehilite': {'css_class': 'highlight'},
        'markdown.extensions.extra': {},
        'markdown.extensions.meta': {},
    },
    'output_format': 'html5',
}

Note

The dictionary defined in your settings file will update this default one.

OUTPUT_PATH = 'output/': Where to output the generated files.

PATH¶: Path to content directory to be processed by Pelican. If undefined, and content path is not specified via an argument to the pelican command, Pelican will use the current working directory.

PAGE_PATHS = ['pages']: A list of directories and files to look at for pages, relative to PATH.

PAGE_EXCLUDES = []: A list of directories to exclude when looking for pages in addition to ARTICLE_PATHS.

ARTICLE_PATHS = ['']: A list of directories and files to look at for articles, relative to PATH.

ARTICLE_EXCLUDES = []: A list of directories to exclude when looking for articles in addition to PAGE_PATHS.

OUTPUT_SOURCES = False: Set to True if you want to copy the articles and pages in their original format (e.g. Markdown or reStructuredText) to the specified OUTPUT_PATH.

OUTPUT_SOURCES_EXTENSION = '.text': Controls the extension that will be used by the SourcesGenerator. Defaults to .text. If not a valid string the default value will be used.

PLUGINS = []: The list of plugins to load. See Plugins.

PLUGIN_PATHS = []: A list of directories where to look for plugins. See Plugins.

SITENAME = 'A Pelican Blog': Your site name

SITEURL¶: Base URL of your web site. Not defined by default, so it is best to specify your SITEURL; if you do not, feeds will not be generated with properly-formed URLs. If your site is available via HTTPS, this setting should begin with https:// — otherwise use http://. Then append your domain, with no trailing slash at the end. Example: SITEURL = 'https://example.com'

STATIC_PATHS = ['images']: A list of directories (relative to PATH) in which to look for static files. Such files will be copied to the output directory without modification. Articles, pages, and other content source files will normally be skipped, so it is safe for a directory to appear both here and in PAGE_PATHS or ARTICLE_PATHS. Pelican’s default settings include the “images” directory here.

STATIC_EXCLUDES = []: A list of directories to exclude when looking for static files.

STATIC_EXCLUDE_SOURCES = True: If set to False, content source files will not be skipped when copying files found in STATIC_PATHS. This setting is for backward compatibility with Pelican releases before version 3.5. It has no effect unless STATIC_PATHS contains a directory that is also in ARTICLE_PATHS or PAGE_PATHS. If you are trying to publish your site’s source files, consider using the OUTPUT_SOURCES setting instead.

STATIC_CREATE_LINKS = False: Create links instead of copying files. If the content and output directories are on the same device, then create hard links. Falls back to symbolic links if the output directory is on a different filesystem. If symlinks are created, don’t forget to add the -L or --copy-links option to rsync when uploading your site.

STATIC_CHECK_IF_MODIFIED = False: If set to True, and STATIC_CREATE_LINKS is False, compare mtimes of content and output files, and only copy content files that are newer than existing output files.

TYPOGRIFY = False: If set to True, several typographical improvements will be incorporated into the generated HTML via the Typogrify library, which can be installed via: pip install typogrify

TYPOGRIFY_IGNORE_TAGS = []: A list of tags for Typogrify to ignore. By default Typogrify will ignore pre and code tags. This requires that Typogrify version 2.0.4 or later is installed

SUMMARY_MAX_LENGTH = 50: When creating a short summary of an article, this will be the default length (measured in words) of the text created. This only applies if your content does not otherwise specify a summary. Setting to None will cause the summary to be a copy of the original content.

WITH_FUTURE_DATES = True: If disabled, content with dates in the future will get a default status of draft. See Reading only modified content for caveats.

INTRASITE_LINK_REGEX = '[{|](?P<what>.*?)[|}]': Regular expression that is used to parse internal links. Default syntax when linking to internal files, tags, etc., is to enclose the identifier, say filename, in {} or ||. Identifier between { and } goes into the what capturing group. For details see Linking to internal content.

PYGMENTS_RST_OPTIONS = []: A list of default Pygments settings for your reStructuredText code blocks. See Syntax highlighting for a list of supported options.

SLUGIFY_SOURCE = 'title': Specifies where you want the slug to be automatically generated from. Can be set to title to use the ‘Title:’ metadata tag or basename to use the article’s file name when creating the slug.

CACHE_CONTENT = False: If True, saves content in caches. See Reading only modified content for details about caching.

CONTENT_CACHING_LAYER = 'reader': If set to 'reader', save only the raw content and metadata returned by readers. If set to 'generator', save processed content objects.

CACHE_PATH = 'cache': Directory in which to store cache files.

GZIP_CACHE = True: If True, use gzip to (de)compress the cache files.

CHECK_MODIFIED_METHOD = 'mtime': Controls how files are checked for modifications.

LOAD_CONTENT_CACHE = False: If True, load unmodified content from caches.

WRITE_SELECTED = []: If this list is not empty, only output files with their paths in this list are written. Paths should be either absolute or relative to the current Pelican working directory. For possible use cases see Writing only selected content.

FORMATTED_FIELDS = ['summary']: A list of metadata fields containing reST/Markdown content to be parsed and translated to HTML.

URL settings¶

The first thing to understand is that there are currently two supported methods for URL formation: relative and absolute. Relative URLs are useful when testing locally, and absolute URLs are reliable and most useful when publishing. One method of supporting both is to have one Pelican configuration file for local development and another for publishing. To see an example of this type of setup, use the pelican-quickstart script as described in the Installation section, which will produce two separate configuration files for local development and publishing, respectively.

You can customize the URLs and locations where files will be saved. The *_URL and *_SAVE_AS variables use Python’s format strings. These variables allow you to place your articles in a location such as {slug}/index.html and link to them as {slug} for clean URLs (see example below). These settings give you the flexibility to place your articles and pages anywhere you want.

Note

If you specify a datetime directive, it will be substituted using the input files’ date metadata attribute. If the date is not specified for a particular file, Pelican will rely on the file’s mtime timestamp. Check the Python datetime documentation for more information.

Also, you can use other file metadata attributes as well:

slug
date
lang
author
category

Example usage:

ARTICLE_URL = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{date:%b}/{date:%d}/{slug}/'
ARTICLE_SAVE_AS = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{date:%b}/{date:%d}/{slug}/index.html'
PAGE_URL = 'pages/{slug}/'
PAGE_SAVE_AS = 'pages/{slug}/index.html'

This would save your articles into something like /posts/2011/Aug/07/sample-post/index.html, save your pages into /pages/about/index.html, and render them available at URLs of /posts/2011/Aug/07/sample-post/ and /pages/about/, respectively.

RELATIVE_URLS = False: Defines whether Pelican should use document-relative URLs or not. Only set this to True when developing/testing and only if you fully understand the effect it can have on links/feeds.

ARTICLE_URL = '{slug}.html': The URL to refer to an article.

ARTICLE_SAVE_AS = '{slug}.html': The place where we will save an article.

ARTICLE_LANG_URL = '{slug}-{lang}.html': The URL to refer to an article which doesn’t use the default language.

ARTICLE_LANG_SAVE_AS = '{slug}-{lang}.html': The place where we will save an article which doesn’t use the default language.

DRAFT_URL = 'drafts/{slug}.html': The URL to refer to an article draft.

DRAFT_SAVE_AS = 'drafts/{slug}.html': The place where we will save an article draft.

DRAFT_LANG_URL = 'drafts/{slug}-{lang}.html': The URL to refer to an article draft which doesn’t use the default language.

DRAFT_LANG_SAVE_AS = 'drafts/{slug}-{lang}.html': The place where we will save an article draft which doesn’t use the default language.

PAGE_URL = 'pages/{slug}.html': The URL we will use to link to a page.

PAGE_SAVE_AS = 'pages/{slug}.html': The location we will save the page. This value has to be the same as PAGE_URL or you need to use a rewrite in your server config.

PAGE_LANG_URL = 'pages/{slug}-{lang}.html': The URL we will use to link to a page which doesn’t use the default language.

PAGE_LANG_SAVE_AS = 'pages/{slug}-{lang}.html': The location we will save the page which doesn’t use the default language.

CATEGORY_URL = 'category/{slug}.html': The URL to use for a category.

CATEGORY_SAVE_AS = 'category/{slug}.html': The location to save a category.

TAG_URL = 'tag/{slug}.html': The URL to use for a tag.

TAG_SAVE_AS = 'tag/{slug}.html': The location to save the tag page.

AUTHOR_URL = 'author/{slug}.html': The URL to use for an author.

AUTHOR_SAVE_AS = 'author/{slug}.html': The location to save an author.

YEAR_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = '': The location to save per-year archives of your posts.

MONTH_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = '': The location to save per-month archives of your posts.

DAY_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = '': The location to save per-day archives of your posts.

SLUG_SUBSTITUTIONS = (): Substitutions to make prior to stripping out non-alphanumerics when generating slugs. Specified as a list of 3-tuples of (from, to, skip) which are applied in order. skip is a boolean indicating whether or not to skip replacement of non-alphanumeric characters. Useful for backward compatibility with existing URLs.

AUTHOR_SUBSTITUTIONS = (): Substitutions for authors. SLUG_SUBSTITUTIONS is not taken into account here!

CATEGORY_SUBSTITUTIONS = (): Added to SLUG_SUBSTITUTIONS for categories.

TAG_SUBSTITUTIONS = (): Added to SLUG_SUBSTITUTIONS for tags.

Note

If you do not want one or more of the default pages to be created (e.g., you are the only author on your site and thus do not need an Authors page), set the corresponding *_SAVE_AS setting to '' to prevent the relevant page from being generated.

Note

Substitutions are applied in order with the side effect that keeping non-alphanum characters applies to the whole string when a replacement is made.

For example if you have the following setting:

SLUG_SUBSTITUTIONS = (('C++', 'cpp'), ('keep dot', 'keep.dot', True))

the string Keep Dot will be converted to keep.dot, however C++ will keep dot will be converted to cpp will keep.dot instead of cpp-will-keep.dot!

If you want to keep non-alphanum characters only for tags or categories but not other slugs then configure TAG_SUBSTITUTIONS and CATEGORY_SUBSTITUTIONS respectively!

Pelican can optionally create per-year, per-month, and per-day archives of your posts. These secondary archives are disabled by default but are automatically enabled if you supply format strings for their respective _SAVE_AS settings. Period archives fit intuitively with the hierarchical model of web URLs and can make it easier for readers to navigate through the posts you’ve written over time.

Example usage:

YEAR_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = 'posts/{date:%Y}/index.html'
MONTH_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{date:%b}/index.html'

With these settings, Pelican will create an archive of all your posts for the year at (for instance) posts/2011/index.html and an archive of all your posts for the month at posts/2011/Aug/index.html.

Note

Period archives work best when the final path segment is index.html. This way a reader can remove a portion of your URL and automatically arrive at an appropriate archive of posts, without having to specify a page name.

DIRECT_TEMPLATES work a bit differently than noted above. Only the _SAVE_AS settings are available, but it is available for any direct template.

ARCHIVES_SAVE_AS = 'archives.html': The location to save the article archives page.

YEAR_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = '': The location to save per-year archives of your posts.

MONTH_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = '': The location to save per-month archives of your posts.

DAY_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = '': The location to save per-day archives of your posts.

AUTHORS_SAVE_AS = 'authors.html': The location to save the author list.

CATEGORIES_SAVE_AS = 'categories.html': The location to save the category list.

TAGS_SAVE_AS = 'tags.html': The location to save the tag list.

INDEX_SAVE_AS = 'index.html': The location to save the list of all articles.

URLs for direct template pages are theme-dependent. Some themes use corresponding *_URL setting as string, while others hard-code them: 'archives.html', 'authors.html', 'categories.html', 'tags.html'.

Time and Date¶

TIMEZONE¶

The timezone used in the date information, to generate Atom and RSS feeds.

If no timezone is defined, UTC is assumed. This means that the generated Atom and RSS feeds will contain incorrect date information if your locale is not UTC.

Pelican issues a warning in case this setting is not defined, as it was not mandatory in previous versions.

Have a look at the wikipedia page to get a list of valid timezone values.

DEFAULT_DATE = None: The default date you want to use. If 'fs', Pelican will use the file system timestamp information (mtime) if it can’t get date information from the metadata. If given any other string, it will be parsed by the same method as article metadata. If set to a tuple object, the default datetime object will instead be generated by passing the tuple to the datetime.datetime constructor.

DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT = '%a %d %B %Y': The default date format you want to use.

DATE_FORMATS = {}

If you manage multiple languages, you can set the date formatting here.

If no DATE_FORMATS are set, Pelican will fall back to DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT. If you need to maintain multiple languages with different date formats, you can set the DATE_FORMATS dictionary using the language name (lang metadata in your post content) as the key.

In addition to the standard C89 strftime format codes that are listed in Python strftime documentation, you can use the - character between % and the format character to remove any leading zeros. For example, %d/%m/%Y will output 01/01/2014 whereas %-d/%-m/%Y will result in 1/1/2014.

DATE_FORMATS = {
    'en': '%a, %d %b %Y',
    'jp': '%Y-%m-%d(%a)',
}

It is also possible to set different locale settings for each language by using a (locale, format) tuple as a dictionary value which will override the LOCALE setting:

# On Unix/Linux
DATE_FORMATS = {
    'en': ('en_US','%a, %d %b %Y'),
    'jp': ('ja_JP','%Y-%m-%d(%a)'),
}

# On Windows
DATE_FORMATS = {
    'en': ('usa','%a, %d %b %Y'),
    'jp': ('jpn','%Y-%m-%d(%a)'),
}

LOCALE¶

Change the locale [1]. A list of locales can be provided here or a single string representing one locale. When providing a list, all the locales will be tried until one works.

You can set locale to further control date format:

 LOCALE = ('usa', 'jpn',      # On Windows
           'en_US', 'ja_JP'   # On Unix/Linux
)

For a list of available locales refer to locales on Windows or on Unix/Linux, use the locale -a command; see manpage locale(1) for more information.

[1]	Default is the system locale.

Template pages¶

TEMPLATE_PAGES = None

A mapping containing template pages that will be rendered with the blog entries. See Template pages.

If you want to generate custom pages besides your blog entries, you can point any Jinja2 template file with a path pointing to the file and the destination path for the generated file.

For instance, if you have a blog with three static pages — a list of books, your resume, and a contact page — you could have:

TEMPLATE_PAGES = {'src/books.html': 'dest/books.html',
                  'src/resume.html': 'dest/resume.html',
                  'src/contact.html': 'dest/contact.html'}

DIRECT_TEMPLATES = ['index', 'categories', 'authors', 'archives']: List of templates that are used directly to render content. Typically direct templates are used to generate index pages for collections of content (e.g., tags and category index pages). If the tag and category collections are not needed, set DIRECT_TEMPLATES = ['index', 'archives']

PAGINATED_DIRECT_TEMPLATES = ['index']: Provides the direct templates that should be paginated.

EXTRA_TEMPLATES_PATHS = []: A list of paths you want Jinja2 to search for templates. Can be used to separate templates from the theme. Example: projects, resume, profile ... These templates need to use DIRECT_TEMPLATES setting.

Metadata¶

AUTHOR¶: Default author (usually your name).

DEFAULT_METADATA = {}: The default metadata you want to use for all articles and pages.

FILENAME_METADATA = r'(?P<date>d{4}-d{2}-d{2}).*'

The regexp that will be used to extract any metadata from the filename. All named groups that are matched will be set in the metadata object. The default value will only extract the date from the filename.

For example, to extract both the date and the slug:

FILENAME_METADATA = r'(?P<date>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(?P<slug>.*)'

Feed settings¶

By default, Pelican uses Atom feeds. However, it is also possible to use RSS feeds if you prefer.

Pelican generates category feeds as well as feeds for all your articles. It does not generate feeds for tags by default, but it is possible to do so using the TAG_FEED_ATOM and TAG_FEED_RSS settings:

FEED_DOMAIN = None, i.e. base URL is "/": The domain prepended to feed URLs. Since feed URLs should always be absolute, it is highly recommended to define this (e.g., “http://feeds.example.com”). If you have already explicitly defined SITEURL (see above) and want to use the same domain for your feeds, you can just set: FEED_DOMAIN = SITEURL.

FEED_ATOM = None, i.e. no Atom feed: Relative URL to output the Atom feed.

FEED_RSS = None, i.e. no RSS: Relative URL to output the RSS feed.

FEED_ALL_ATOM = 'feeds/all.atom.xml': Relative URL to output the all-posts Atom feed: this feed will contain all posts regardless of their language.

FEED_ALL_RSS = None, i.e. no all-posts RSS: Relative URL to output the all-posts RSS feed: this feed will contain all posts regardless of their language.

CATEGORY_FEED_ATOM = 'feeds/%s.atom.xml': Where to put the category Atom feeds. [2]

CATEGORY_FEED_RSS = None, i.e. no RSS: Where to put the category RSS feeds.

AUTHOR_FEED_ATOM = 'feeds/%s.atom.xml': Where to put the author Atom feeds. [2]

AUTHOR_FEED_RSS = 'feeds/%s.rss.xml': Where to put the author RSS feeds. [2]

TAG_FEED_ATOM = None, i.e. no tag feed: Relative URL to output the tag Atom feed. It should be defined using a “%s” match in the tag name.

TAG_FEED_RSS = None, i.e. no RSS tag feed: Relative URL to output the tag RSS feed

FEED_MAX_ITEMS¶: Maximum number of items allowed in a feed. Feed item quantity is unrestricted by default.

RSS_FEED_SUMMARY_ONLY = True: Only include item summaries in the description tag of RSS feeds. If set to False, the full content will be included instead. This setting doesn’t affect Atom feeds, only RSS ones.

If you don’t want to generate some or any of these feeds, set the above variables to None.

[2]	(1, 2, 3) %s is the name of the category.

FeedBurner¶

If you want to use FeedBurner for your feed, you will likely need to decide upon a unique identifier. For example, if your site were called “Thyme” and hosted on the www.example.com domain, you might use “thymefeeds” as your unique identifier, which we’ll use throughout this section for illustrative purposes. In your Pelican settings, set the FEED_ATOM attribute to thymefeeds/main.xml to create an Atom feed with an original address of http://www.example.com/thymefeeds/main.xml. Set the FEED_DOMAIN attribute to http://feeds.feedburner.com, or http://feeds.example.com if you are using a CNAME on your own domain (i.e., FeedBurner’s “MyBrand” feature).

There are two fields to configure in the FeedBurner interface: “Original Feed” and “Feed Address”. In this example, the “Original Feed” would be http://www.example.com/thymefeeds/main.xml and the “Feed Address” suffix would be thymefeeds/main.xml.

Pagination¶

The default behaviour of Pelican is to list all the article titles along with a short description on the index page. While this works well for small-to-medium sites, sites with a large quantity of articles will probably benefit from paginating this list.

You can use the following settings to configure the pagination.

DEFAULT_ORPHANS = 0: The minimum number of articles allowed on the last page. Use this when you don’t want the last page to only contain a handful of articles.

DEFAULT_PAGINATION = False: The maximum number of articles to include on a page, not including orphans. False to disable pagination.

PAGINATION_PATTERNS¶: A set of patterns that are used to determine advanced pagination output.

Using Pagination Patterns¶

The PAGINATION_PATTERNS setting can be used to configure where subsequent pages are created. The setting is a sequence of three element tuples, where each tuple consists of:

(minimum page, URL setting, SAVE_AS setting,)

For example, if you wanted the first page to just be /, and the second (and subsequent) pages to be /page/2/, you would set PAGINATION_PATTERNS as follows:

PAGINATION_PATTERNS = (
    (1, '{base_name}/', '{base_name}/index.html'),
    (2, '{base_name}/page/{number}/', '{base_name}/page/{number}/index.html'),
)

This would cause the first page to be written to {base_name}/index.html, and subsequent ones would be written into page/{number} directories.

Translations¶

Pelican offers a way to translate articles. See the Content section for more information.

DEFAULT_LANG = 'en': The default language to use.

TRANSLATION_FEED_ATOM = 'feeds/all-%s.atom.xml': Where to put the Atom feed for translations. [3]

TRANSLATION_FEED_RSS = None, i.e. no RSS: Where to put the RSS feed for translations.

[3]	%s is the language

Ordering content¶

NEWEST_FIRST_ARCHIVES = True: Order archives by newest first by date. (False: orders by date with older articles first.)

REVERSE_CATEGORY_ORDER = False: Reverse the category order. (True: lists by reverse alphabetical order; default lists alphabetically.)

ARTICLE_ORDER_BY = 'reversed-date': Defines how the articles (articles_page.object_list in the template) are sorted. Valid options are: metadata as a string (use reversed- prefix the reverse the sort order), special option 'basename' which will use the basename of the file (without path) or a custom function to extract the sorting key from articles. The default value, 'reversed-date', will sort articles by date in reverse order (i.e. newest article comes first).

PAGE_ORDER_BY = 'basename': Defines how the pages (PAGES variable in the template) are sorted. Options are same as ARTICLE_ORDER_BY. The default value, 'basename' will sort pages by their basename.

Themes¶

Creating Pelican themes is addressed in a dedicated section (see Creating themes). However, here are the settings that are related to themes.

THEME¶: Theme to use to produce the output. Can be a relative or absolute path to a theme folder, or the name of a default theme or a theme installed via pelican-themes (see below).

THEME_STATIC_DIR = 'theme': Destination directory in the output path where Pelican will place the files collected from THEME_STATIC_PATHS. Default is theme.

THEME_STATIC_PATHS = ['static']: Static theme paths you want to copy. Default value is static, but if your theme has other static paths, you can put them here. If files or directories with the same names are included in the paths defined in this settings, they will be progressively overwritten.

CSS_FILE = 'main.css': Specify the CSS file you want to load.

By default, two themes are available. You can specify them using the THEME setting or by passing the -t option to the pelican command:

notmyidea
simple (a synonym for “plain text” :)

There are a number of other themes available at https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes. Pelican comes with pelican-themes, a small script for managing themes.

You can define your own theme, either by starting from scratch or by duplicating and modifying a pre-existing theme. Here is a guide on how to create your theme.

Following are example ways to specify your preferred theme:

# Specify name of a built-in theme
THEME = "notmyidea"
# Specify name of a theme installed via the pelican-themes tool
THEME = "chunk"
# Specify a customized theme, via path relative to the settings file
THEME = "themes/mycustomtheme"
# Specify a customized theme, via absolute path
THEME = "/home/myuser/projects/mysite/themes/mycustomtheme"

The built-in notmyidea theme can make good use of the following settings. Feel free to use them in your themes as well.

SITESUBTITLE¶: A subtitle to appear in the header.

DISQUS_SITENAME¶: Pelican can handle Disqus comments. Specify the Disqus sitename identifier here.

GITHUB_URL¶: Your GitHub URL (if you have one). It will then use this information to create a GitHub ribbon.

GOOGLE_ANALYTICS¶: Set to UA-XXXXX-Y Property’s tracking ID to activate Google Analytics.

GA_COOKIE_DOMAIN¶: Set cookie domain field of Google Analytics tracking code. Defaults to auto.

GOSQUARED_SITENAME¶: Set to ‘XXX-YYYYYY-X’ to activate GoSquared.

MENUITEMS¶: A list of tuples (Title, URL) for additional menu items to appear at the beginning of the main menu.

PIWIK_URL¶: URL to your Piwik server - without ‘http://‘ at the beginning.

PIWIK_SSL_URL¶: If the SSL-URL differs from the normal Piwik-URL you have to include this setting too. (optional)

PIWIK_SITE_ID¶: ID for the monitored website. You can find the ID in the Piwik admin interface > Settings > Websites.

LINKS¶: A list of tuples (Title, URL) for links to appear on the header.

SOCIAL¶: A list of tuples (Title, URL) to appear in the “social” section.

TWITTER_USERNAME¶: Allows for adding a button to articles to encourage others to tweet about them. Add your Twitter username if you want this button to appear.

LINKS_WIDGET_NAME¶: Allows override of the name of the links widget. If not specified, defaults to “links”.

SOCIAL_WIDGET_NAME¶: Allows override of the name of the “social” widget. If not specified, defaults to “social”.

In addition, you can use the “wide” version of the notmyidea theme by adding the following to your configuration:

CSS_FILE = "wide.css"

Logging¶

Sometimes, a long list of warnings may appear during site generation. Finding the meaningful error message in the middle of tons of annoying log output can be quite tricky. In order to filter out redundant log messages, Pelican comes with the LOG_FILTER setting.

LOG_FILTER should be a list of tuples (level, msg), each of them being composed of the logging level (up to warning) and the message to be ignored. Simply populate the list with the log messages you want to hide, and they will be filtered out.

For example:

[(logging.WARN, 'TAG_SAVE_AS is set to False')]

It is possible to filter out messages by a template. Check out source code to obtain a template.

For example:

[(logging.WARN, 'Empty alt attribute for image %s in %s')]

Warning

Silencing messages by templates is a dangerous feature. It is possible to unintentionally filter out multiple message types with the same template (including messages from future Pelican versions). Proceed with caution.

Note

This option does nothing if --debug is passed.

Reading only modified content¶

To speed up the build process, Pelican can optionally read only articles and pages with modified content.

When Pelican is about to read some content source file:

The hash or modification time information for the file from a previous build are loaded from a cache file if LOAD_CONTENT_CACHE is True. These files are stored in the CACHE_PATH directory. If the file has no record in the cache file, it is read as usual.
The file is checked according to CHECK_MODIFIED_METHOD:
- If set to 'mtime', the modification time of the file is checked.
- If set to a name of a function provided by the hashlib module, e.g. 'md5', the file hash is checked.
- If set to anything else or the necessary information about the file cannot be found in the cache file, the content is read as usual.
If the file is considered unchanged, the content data saved in a previous build corresponding to the file is loaded from the cache, and the file is not read.
If the file is considered changed, the file is read and the new modification information and the content data are saved to the cache if CACHE_CONTENT is True.

If CONTENT_CACHING_LAYER is set to 'reader' (the default), the raw content and metadata returned by a reader are cached. If this setting is instead set to 'generator', the processed content object is cached. Caching the processed content object may conflict with plugins (as some reading related signals may be skipped) and the WITH_FUTURE_DATES functionality (as the draft status of the cached content objects would not change automatically over time).

Checking modification times is faster than comparing file hashes, but it is not as reliable because mtime information can be lost, e.g., when copying content source files using the cp or rsync commands without the mtime preservation mode (which for rsync can be invoked by passing the --archive flag).

The cache files are Python pickles, so they may not be readable by different versions of Python as the pickle format often changes. If such an error is encountered, it is caught and the cache file is rebuilt automatically in the new format. The cache files will also be rebuilt after the GZIP_CACHE setting has been changed.

The --ignore-cache command-line option is useful when the whole cache needs to be regenerated, such as when making modifications to the settings file that will affect the cached content, or just for debugging purposes. When Pelican runs in autoreload mode, modification of the settings file will make it ignore the cache automatically if AUTORELOAD_IGNORE_CACHE is True.

Note that even when using cached content, all output is always written, so the modification times of the generated *.html files will always change. Therefore, rsync-based uploading may benefit from the --checksum option.

Writing only selected content¶

When only working on a single article or page, or making tweaks to your theme, it is often desirable to generate and review your work as quickly as possible. In such cases, generating and writing the entire site output is often unnecessary. By specifying only the desired files as output paths in the WRITE_SELECTED list, only those files will be written. This list can be also specified on the command line using the --write-selected option, which accepts a comma-separated list of output file paths. By default this list is empty, so all output is written. See Site generation for more details.

Example settings¶

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from __future__ import unicode_literals

AUTHOR = 'Alexis Métaireau'
SITENAME = "Alexis' log"
SITEURL = 'http://blog.notmyidea.org'
TIMEZONE = "Europe/Paris"

# can be useful in development, but set to False when you're ready to publish
RELATIVE_URLS = True

GITHUB_URL = 'http://github.com/ametaireau/'
DISQUS_SITENAME = "blog-notmyidea"
REVERSE_CATEGORY_ORDER = True
LOCALE = "C"
DEFAULT_PAGINATION = 4
DEFAULT_DATE = (2012, 3, 2, 14, 1, 1)

FEED_ALL_RSS = 'feeds/all.rss.xml'
CATEGORY_FEED_RSS = 'feeds/%s.rss.xml'

LINKS = (('Biologeek', 'http://biologeek.org'),
         ('Filyb', "http://filyb.info/"),
         ('Libert-fr', "http://www.libert-fr.com"),
         ('N1k0', "http://prendreuncafe.com/blog/"),
         ('Tarek Ziadé', "http://ziade.org/blog"),
         ('Zubin Mithra', "http://zubin71.wordpress.com/"),)

SOCIAL = (('twitter', 'http://twitter.com/ametaireau'),
          ('lastfm', 'http://lastfm.com/user/akounet'),
          ('github', 'http://github.com/ametaireau'),)

# global metadata to all the contents
DEFAULT_METADATA = {'yeah': 'it is'}

# path-specific metadata
EXTRA_PATH_METADATA = {
    'extra/robots.txt': {'path': 'robots.txt'},
    }

# static paths will be copied without parsing their contents
STATIC_PATHS = [
    'pictures',
    'extra/robots.txt',
    ]

# custom page generated with a jinja2 template
TEMPLATE_PAGES = {'pages/jinja2_template.html': 'jinja2_template.html'}

# code blocks with line numbers
PYGMENTS_RST_OPTIONS = {'linenos': 'table'}

# foobar will not be used, because it's not in caps. All configuration keys
# have to be in caps
foobar = "barbaz"