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

Setting name (followed by default value, if any) What does it do?
AUTHOR Default author (put your name)
DATE_FORMATS = {} If you manage multiple languages, you can set the date formatting here. See the “Date format and locale” section below for details.
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.
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 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.
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 set to a tuple object, the default datetime object will instead be generated by passing the tuple to the datetime.datetime constructor.
DEFAULT_METADATA = () The default metadata you want to use for all articles and pages.
DOCUTILS_SETTINGS = {} Extra configuration settings for the docutils publisher (applicable only to reStructuredText). See Docutils Configuration settings for more details.
FILENAME_METADATA = '(?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, if you would like to extract both the date and the slug, you could set something like: '(?P<date>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(?P<slug>.*)'. See Path metadata and SLUGIFY_SOURCE.
PATH_METADATA = '' Like FILENAME_METADATA, but parsed from a page’s full path relative to the content source directory. See Path metadata.
EXTRA_PATH_METADATA = {} Extra metadata dictionaries keyed by relative path. Relative paths require correct OS-specific directory separators (i.e. / in UNIX and \ in Windows) unlike some other Pelican file settings. See Path metadata.
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 tuple of filenames that should be retained and not deleted from the output directory. One use case would be the preservation of version control data. For example: (".hg", ".git", ".bzr")
JINJA_EXTENSIONS = [] A list of any Jinja2 extensions you want to use.
JINJA_FILTERS = {} A list of custom Jinja2 filters you want to use. The dictionary should map the filtername to the filter function. For example: {'urlencode': urlencode_filter} See Jinja custom filters documentation.
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.
LOG_FILTER = [] A list of tuples containing the logging level (up to warning) and the message to be ignored. For example: [(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 file globbing patterns to match against the source files to be ignored by the processor. For example, the default ['.#*'] will ignore emacs lock files.
MD_EXTENSIONS = ['codehilite(css_class=highlight)','extra'] A list of the extensions that the Markdown processor will use. Refer to the Python Markdown documentation’s Extensions section for a complete list of supported extensions. (Note that defining this in your settings file will override and replace the default values. If your goal is to add to the default values for this setting, you’ll need to include them explicitly and enumerate the full list of desired Markdown extensions.)
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.
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.
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 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'
TEMPLATE_PAGES = None A mapping containing template pages that will be rendered with the blog entries. See Template pages.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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 = True If True, save content in a cache file. 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 = True If True, load unmodified content from cache.
AUTORELOAD_IGNORE_CACHE = False If True, do not load content cache in autoreload mode when the settings file changes.
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.
[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. 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.

Setting name (followed by default value, if any) 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_ORDER_BY = 'slug' The metadata attribute used to sort articles. By default, the articles_page.object_list template variable is ordered by slug. If you modify this, make sure all articles contain the attribute you specify. You can also specify a “sorting” function of one argument that is used to extract a comparison key from each article. For example, sorting by title without using the built-in functionality would use the function operator.attrgetter('title').
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_ORDER_BY = 'basename' The metadata attribute used to sort pages. By default the PAGES template variable is ordered by basename (i.e., path not included). Note that the option 'basename' is a special option supported in the source code. If you modify this setting, make sure all pages contain the attribute you specify. You can also specify a “sorting” function of one argument that is used to extract a comparison key from each page. For example, the basename function looks similar to lambda x: os.path.basename(getattr(x, 'source_path', '')).
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 2-tuples of (from, to) which are applied in order.

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.

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, which are ('index', 'tags', 'categories', 'archives') by default, work a bit differently than noted above. Only the _SAVE_AS settings are available, but it is available for any direct template.

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

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_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 - 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)',
}

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_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)'),
}

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.

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'}

Path metadata

Not all metadata needs to be embedded in source file itself. For example, blog posts are often named following a YYYY-MM-DD-SLUG.rst pattern, or nested into YYYY/MM/DD-SLUG directories. To extract metadata from the filename or path, set FILENAME_METADATA or PATH_METADATA to regular expressions that use Python’s group name notation (?P<name>…). If you want to attach additional metadata but don’t want to encode it in the path, you can set EXTRA_PATH_METADATA:

EXTRA_PATH_METADATA = {
    'relative/path/to/file-1': {
        'key-1a': 'value-1a',
        'key-1b': 'value-1b',
        },
    'relative/path/to/file-2': {
        'key-2': 'value-2',
        },
    }

This can be a convenient way to shift the installed location of a particular file:

# Take advantage of the following defaults
# STATIC_SAVE_AS = '{path}'
# STATIC_URL = '{path}'
STATIC_PATHS = [
    'static/robots.txt',
    ]
EXTRA_PATH_METADATA = {
    'static/robots.txt': {'path': 'robots.txt'},
    }

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 (followed by default value, if any) 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 = 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' [2] Where to put the category Atom feeds.
CATEGORY_FEED_RSS = None, i.e. no RSS Where to put the category RSS feeds.
AUTHOR_FEED_ATOM = 'feeds/%s.atom.xml' [2] Where to put the author Atom feeds.
AUTHOR_FEED_RSS = 'feeds/%s.rss.xml' [2] Where to put the author 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, 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.

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.

Tag cloud

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

Setting name (followed by 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 include a tag cloud, but it is pretty easy to add one:

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

You should then also define CSS styles with appropriate classes (tag-1 to tag-N, where N matches TAG_CLOUD_STEPS), tag-1 being the most frequent, and define a ul.tagcloud class with appropriate list-style to create the cloud. For example:

ul.tagcloud {
  list-style: none;
    padding: 0;
}

ul.tagcloud li {
    display: inline-block;
}

li.tag-1 {
    font-size: 150%;
}

li.tag-2 {
    font-size: 120%;
}

...

Translations

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

Setting name (followed by default value, if any) What does it do?
DEFAULT_LANG = 'en' The default language to use.
TRANSLATION_FEED_ATOM = 'feeds/all-%s.atom.xml' [3] Where to put the Atom feed for translations.
TRANSLATION_FEED_RSS = None, i.e. no RSS Where to put the RSS feed for translations.
[3]%s is the language

Ordering content

Setting name (followed by 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.)

Themes

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

Setting name (followed by default value, if any) What does it do?
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.

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

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')]

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.
  3. 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.

  4. 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, the cache files have to be rebuilt by removing them and re-running Pelican, or by using the Pelican command-line option --ignore-cache. The cache files also have to be rebuilt when changing the GZIP_CACHE setting for cache file reading to work properly.

The --ignore-cache command-line option is also 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.

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"
PDF_GENERATOR = False
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"