Installing Pelican

This article assumes you are working in some type of linux development environment. Some of these instructions are specific to using Ubuntu. Check your linux for equivalent commands.

First make sure virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper are installed. Go here for more information: Installing virtualenv

Next create a virtual environment for your Pelican site:

mkvirtualenv grok

After creating the virtualenv the linux command prompt will change to include the name of the virtualenv:

(grok)$

The command ‘deactivate’ will turn off the active virtualenv. The command ‘workon grok’ will turn on the virtualenv named ‘grok’.

Make sure the correct virtualenv is turned on when working on a project.

If there is a requirements file for the project the run it to set things up:

(grok)$ pip install -r requirements.txt

If there are any extra requirements for this project add them now.

Use Pelican QuickStart

Use the pelican-quickstart utility to initialize your project:

(grok)$ pelican-quickstart

The quickstart will ask several questions, and for this project be sure to say YES to:

Do you want to upload your website using Rackspace Cloud Files? (y/N) y

And answer the extra questions about your rackspace account. The container will be created if it does not exist.

??? What does quickstart do with these values? ??? I want them in environment variables so they are not in any files committed to git. ??? This may take a bit of hacking…