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 given as the form of a python module (a file). You can have an example by looking at /samples/pelican.conf.py
All the settings identifiers must be set in caps, otherwise they will not be processed.
The settings you define in the configuration file will be passed to the templates, it allows you to use them to add site-wide contents if you need.
Here is a list of settings for pelican, regarding the different features.
Basic settings¶
| Setting name (default value) | what does it do? |
|---|---|
ARTICLE_PERMALINK_STRUCTURE ('') |
Empty by default. Allows to render URLs in a particular way, see below. |
| AUTHOR | Default author (put your name) |
CLEAN_URLS (False) |
.html, so you will have to setup URL rewriting on your web server. |
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 fallback on. |
DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT ('%a %d %B %Y') |
The default date format you want to use. |
DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU (True) |
Display or not the pages on the menu of the template. Templates can follow or not this settings. |
FALLBACK_ON_FS_DATE (True) |
If True, pelican will use the file system dates infos (mtime) if it can’t get informations from the metadata |
JINJA_EXTENSIONS ([]) |
A list of any Jinja2 extensions you want to use. |
DELETE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY (False) |
Delete the output directory and just the generated 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, 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. |
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 if pelican should use relative urls or not. |
SITENAME ('A Pelican Blog') |
Your site name |
| SITEURL | base URL of your website. Note that this is not a way to tell pelican to use relative urls or static ones. You should rather use the RELATIVE_URL setting for such use. |
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. |
| [1] | Default is the system locale. Default is to delete the output directory. |
Article permalink structure¶
Allow to render articles sorted by date, in case you specify a format as specified in the example. It follows the python datetime directives:
- %Y: Year with century as a decimal number.
- %m: Month as a decimal number [01,12].
- %d: Day of the month as a decimal number [01,31].
Note: if you specify a datetime directive, it will be substituted using the date metadata field into the rest file. if the date is not specified, pelican will rely on the mtime of your file.
Check the python datetime documentation at http://bit.ly/cNcJUC for more information.
Also, you can use any metadata in the restructured text files:
- category: ‘%(category)s’
- author: ‘%(author)s’
- tags: ‘%(tags)s’
- date: ‘%(date)s’
Example usage:
- ‘/%Y/%m/’ it will be something like ‘/2011/07/sample-post.html’.
- ‘/%Y/%(category)s/’ it will be something like ‘/2011/life/sample-post.html’.
Timezone¶
If no timezone is defined, UTC is assumed. This means that the generated atom and rss feeds will have wrong 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 old versions.
Have a look at the wikipedia page to get a list of values to set your timezone.
Date format and locale¶
If no DATE_FORMAT is set, fallback to DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT. If you need to
maintain multiple languages with different date format, you can set this dict
using language name (lang in your posts) as key. About 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) tuple in dict, and 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)’),}
For available list of locales on Windows . On Unix/Linux usually you can get
a list of available locales with command locale -a, see manpage locale(1) for help.
Feed settings¶
By default, pelican uses atom feeds. However, it is possible to use RSS feeds instead, at your covenience.
Pelican generates category feeds as well as feeds for all your articles. It does
not generate feeds for tags per default, but it is possible to do so using
the TAG_FEED and TAG_FEED_RSS settings:
| Setting name (default value) | what does it do? |
|---|---|
| CATEGORY_FEED (‘feeds/%s.atom.xml’[2]) | Where to put the atom categories feeds. |
CATEGORY_FEED_RSS (None, i.e. no RSS) |
Where to put the categories rss feeds. |
FEED ('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. |
TAG_FEED (None, ie no tag feed) |
relative url to output the tags atom feed. It should be defined using a “%s” matchin 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. Feeds are unrestricted by default. |
| [2] | %s is the name of the category. |
Pagination¶
The default behaviour of pelican is to list all the articles titles alongside with a short description of them on the index page. While it works pretty well for little to medium blogs, it is convenient to have a way to paginate this.
You can use the following settings to configure the pagination.
| Setting name (default value) | what does it do? |
|---|---|
| DEFAULT_ORPHANS (0) | The minimum number of articles allowed on the last page. Use this when you don’t want to have a last page with very few articles. |
| DEFAULT_PAGINATION (False) | The maximum number of articles to include on a page, not including orphans. False to disable pagination. |
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 tags count 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 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 section on getting started for more information about that.
| 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 RSS feed for translations. |
| [3] | %s is the language |
Ordering contents¶
| Setting name (default value) | what does it do? |
|---|---|
REVERSE_ARCHIVE_ORDER (False) |
Reverse the archives order. (True makes it in descending order: the newer first) |
REVERSE_CATEGORY_ORDER (False) |
Reverse the category order. (True makes it in descending order, default is 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 values 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 |
By default, two themes are availablee. You can specify them using the -t option:
- notmyidea
- simple (a synonym for “full text” :)
You can define your own theme too, and specify it’s emplacement in the same way (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/ametaireau/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 to use them too in your themes.
| Setting name | what does it do ? |
|---|---|
| DISQUS_SITENAME | Pelican can handle disqus comments, specify the sitename you’ve filled in on disqus |
| GITHUB_URL | Your github URL (if you have one), it will then use it to create a github ribbon. |
| GOOGLE_ANALYTICS | ‘UA-XXXX-YYYY’ to activate google analytics. |
| 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 to add a button on the articles to tweet about them. Add you twitter username if you want this button to appear. |
In addition, you can use the “wide” version of the notmyidea theme, by adding that in your configuration:
CSS_FILE = "wide.css"
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 = ""
DEFAULT_PAGINATION = 2
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"
