This is my first article of this fresh web-blog on Github Pages. After some research, I decided to try Pelican as a static site generator. Since it is Python based, I thought maybe I could add more custom features later on. The plan is to dump thoughts and experience in here, just for fun. Starting with setting up this project.

First I had to create a project dir and start a venv there:

mkdir myproject
cd myproject
virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Then basically install pelican via pip and create a boilerplate:

python -m pip install pelican
pelican-quickstart

The quickstart command will start an interrogation to create config for the makefile, make sure to say "yes" to the Github Pages option. Makefile has all the required commands to generate and serve the site. In order to have auto deployment on Github actions, I added the following deployment workflow:

name: Pelican Deploy

on:
push:
   branches: [ "master" ]
pull_request:
   branches: [ "master" ]

jobs:
build:
   runs-on: ubuntu-latest

   steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
      uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Set up Python
      uses: actions/setup-python@v2
      with:
         python-version: '3.x'

      - name: Install dependencies
      run: |
         python -m pip install --upgrade pip
         pip install pelican
      - name: Generate site
      run: |
         pelican content
      - name: Publish to GitHub Pages
      uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
      with:
         github_token: ${{ secrets.YOUR_SECRENT_NAME }}
         publish_dir: output

After adding this deployment yaml file to .github/workflows/, I had to define YOUR_SECRENT_NAME as a variable in the repo and generate a personal token for it. This deployment workflow will generate the static content and push it to gh-pages branch (from where I had to select as my deployment page).

Now I will push this to my Github Page and see how it goes!

Next, I will play around with themes then create the 404 and about pages.

Ciao!