Settings

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

$ pelican -s path/to/your/settingsfile.py path

Settings are configured in the form of a Python module (a file). You can see an example by looking at /samples/pelican.conf.py

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.

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

Setting name (default value) What does it do?
AUTHOR Default author (put your name)
DATE_FORMATS ({}) If you do manage multiple languages, you can set the date formatting here. See “Date format and locales” section below for details.
DEFAULT_CATEGORY ('misc') The default category to fall back on.
DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT ('%a %d %B %Y') The default date format you want to use.
DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU (True) Whether to display pages on the menu of the template. Templates may or not honor this setting.
DEFAULT_DATE (fs) 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 tuple object, it will instead generate the default datetime object by passing the tuple to the datetime.datetime constructor.
JINJA_EXTENSIONS ([]) A list of any Jinja2 extensions you want to use.
DELETE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY (False) Delete the content of the output directory before generating new files.
LOCALE (‘’[1]) Change the locale. 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.
MARKUP (('rst', 'md')) A list of available markup languages you want to use. For the moment, the only available values are rst and md.
MD_EXTENSIONS (['codehilite','extra']) A list of the extensions that the Markdown processor will use. Refer to the extensions chapter in the Python-Markdown documentation for a complete list of supported extensions.
OUTPUT_PATH ('output/') Where to output the generated files.
PATH (None) Path to look at for input files.
PAGE_DIR ('pages') Directory to look at for pages.
PAGE_EXCLUDES (()) A list of directories to exclude when looking for pages.
ARTICLE_DIR ('') Directory to look at for articles.
ARTICLE_EXCLUDES: (('pages',)) A list of directories to exclude when looking for articles.
PDF_GENERATOR (False) Set to True if you want to have PDF versions of your documents. You will need to install rst2pdf.
RELATIVE_URLS (True) Defines whether Pelican should use document-relative URLs or not. If set to False, Pelican will use the SITEURL setting to construct absolute URLs.
PLUGINS ([]) The list of plugins to load. See Plugins.
SITENAME ('A Pelican Blog') Your site name
SITEURL Base URL of your website. 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. You should include http:// and your domain, with no trailing slash at the end. Example: SITEURL = 'http://mydomain.com'
STATIC_PATHS (['images']) The static paths you want to have accessible on the output path “static”. By default, Pelican will copy the ‘images’ folder to the output folder.
TIMEZONE The timezone used in the date information, to generate Atom and RSS feeds. See the “timezone” section below for more info.
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
LESS_GENERATOR (FALSE) Set to True or complete path to lessc (if not found in system PATH) to enable compiling less css files. Requires installation of less css.
DIRECT_TEMPLATES (('index', 'tags', 'categories', '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.
PAGINATED_DIRECT_TEMPLATES (('index',)) Provides the direct templates that should be paginated.
SUMMARY_MAX_LENGTH (50) When creating a short summary of an article, this will be the default length 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.
[1]Default is the system locale.

URL settings

The first thing to understand is that there are currently two supported methods for URL formation: relative and absolute. Document-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 at the top of the Getting Started page, 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 URLs 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. 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 at http://bit.ly/cNcJUC 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’

This would save your articles in something like ‘/posts/2011/Aug/07/sample-post/index.html’, and the URL to this would be ‘/posts/2011/Aug/07/sample-post/’.

Setting name (default value) what does it do?
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.
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.
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.
AUTHOR_URL (‘author/{name}.html’) The URL to use for an author.
AUTHOR_SAVE_AS (‘author/{name}.html’) The location to save an author.
CATEGORY_URL (‘category/{name}.html’) The URL to use for a category.
CATEGORY_SAVE_AS (‘category/{name}.html’) The location to save a category.
TAG_URL (‘tag/{name}.html’) The URL to use for a tag.
TAG_SAVE_AS (‘tag/{name}.html’) The location to save the tag page.
<DIRECT_TEMPLATE_NAME>_SAVE_AS The location to save content generated from direct templates. Where <DIRECT_TEMPLATE_NAME> is the upper case template name.

Note

When any of *_SAVE_AS is set to False, files will not be created.

Timezone

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.

Date format and locale

If no DATE_FORMAT is set, fall back to DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT. If you need to maintain multiple languages with different date formats, you can set this dict using language name (lang in your posts) as key. Regarding available format codes, see strftime document of python :

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

You can set locale to further control date format:

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

Also, it is possible to set different locale settings for each language. If you put (locale, format) tuples in the dict, this will override the LOCALE setting above:

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

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

This is a list of available locales on Windows . On Unix/Linux, usually you can get a list of available locales via the locale -a command; see manpage locale(1) for more information.

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:

Setting name (default value) What does it do?
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 ('feeds/all.atom.xml') Relative URL to output the Atom feed.
FEED_RSS (None, i.e. no RSS) Relative URL to output the RSS feed.
CATEGORY_FEED_ATOM (‘feeds/%s.atom.xml’[2]) Where to put the category Atom feeds.
CATEGORY_FEED_RSS (None, i.e. no RSS) Where to put the category RSS feeds.
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, ie 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.

If you don’t want to generate some of these feeds, set None to the variables above. If you don’t want to generate any feeds set both FEED_ATOM and FEED_RSS to none.

[2]%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.

Tag cloud

If you want to generate a tag cloud with all your tags, you can do so using the following settings.

Setting name (default value) What does it do?
TAG_CLOUD_STEPS (4) Count of different font sizes in the tag cloud.
TAG_CLOUD_MAX_ITEMS (100) Maximum number of tags in the cloud.

The default theme does not support tag clouds, but it is pretty easy to add:

<ul>
    {% for tag in tag_cloud %}
        <li class="tag-{{ tag.1 }}"><a href="/tag/{{ tag.0 }}/">{{ tag.0 }}</a></li>
    {% endfor %}
</ul>

You should then also define a CSS style with the appropriate classes (tag-0 to tag-N, where N matches TAG_CLOUD_STEPS -1).

Translations

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

Setting name (default value) What does it do?
DEFAULT_LANG ('en') The default language to use.
TRANSLATION_FEED (‘feeds/all-%s.atom.xml’[3]) Where to put the feed for translations.
[3]%s is the language

Ordering content

Setting name (default value) What does it do?
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.)

Theming

Theming is addressed in a dedicated section (see How to create themes for Pelican). However, here are the settings that are related to theming.

Setting name (default value) What does it do?
THEME Theme to use to produce the output. Can be the complete static path to a theme folder, or chosen between the list of default themes (see below)
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.
CSS_FILE ('main.css') Specify the CSS file you want to load.
WEBASSETS (False) Asset management with webassets (see below)

By default, two themes are available. You can specify them using the -t option:

  • notmyidea
  • simple (a synonym for “full text” :)

You can define your own theme too, and specify its placement in the same manner. (Be sure to specify the full absolute path to it.)

Here is a guide on how to create your theme

You can find a list of themes at http://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes.

Pelican comes with pelican-themes, a small script for managing themes.

The notmyidea theme can make good use of the following settings. I recommend using them in your themes as well.

Setting name What does it do ?
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 ‘UA-XXXX-YYYY’ to activate Google Analytics.
GOSQUARED_SITENAME ‘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.

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

CSS_FILE = "wide.css"

Asset management

The WEBASSETS setting allows to use the webassets module to manage assets (css, js). The module must first be installed:

pip install webassets

webassets allows to concatenate your assets and to use almost all of the hype tools of the moment (see the documentation):

  • css minifier (cssmin, yuicompressor, ...)
  • css compiler (less, sass, ...)
  • js minifier (uglifyjs, yuicompressor, closure, ...)

Others filters include gzip compression, integration of images in css with datauri and more. Webassets also append a version identifier to your asset url to convince browsers to download new versions of your assets when you use far future expires headers.

When using it with Pelican, webassets is configured to process assets in the OUTPUT_PATH/theme directory. You can use it in your templates with a template tag, for example:

{% assets filters="cssmin", output="css/style.min.css", "css/inuit.css", "css/pygment-monokai.css", "css/main.css" %}
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ ASSETS_URL }}">
{% endassets %}

will produce a minified css file with the version identifier:

<link href="http://{SITEURL}/theme/css/style.min.css?b3a7c807" rel="stylesheet">

Another example for javascript:

{% assets filters="uglifyjs,gzip", output="js/packed.js", "js/jquery.js", "js/base.js", "js/widgets.js" %}
    <script src="{{ ASSETS_URL }}"></script>
{% endassets %}

will produce a minified and gzipped js file:

<script src="http://{SITEURL}/theme/js/packed.js?00703b9d"></script>

Example settings

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
AUTHOR = u'Alexis Métaireau'
SITENAME = u"Alexis' log"
SITEURL = 'http://blog.notmyidea.org'
TIMEZONE = "Europe/Paris"

GITHUB_URL = 'http://github.com/ametaireau/'
DISQUS_SITENAME = "blog-notmyidea"
PDF_GENERATOR = False
REVERSE_CATEGORY_ORDER = True
LOCALE = "C"
DEFAULT_PAGINATION = 4
DEFAULT_DATE = (2012, 03, 02, 14, 01, 01)

FEED_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/"),
         (u'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'),)

# static paths will be copied under the same name
STATIC_PATHS = ["pictures", ]

# A list of files to copy from the source to the destination
FILES_TO_COPY = (('extra/robots.txt', 'robots.txt'),)

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