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Publishing with Pelican on Windows

To get things started I thought it might be a good idea to document using Pelican on Windows with Github and Gandi for blog publishing. I’ll start by configuring Pelican and Github. Once that’s working I’ll then talk about configuring Gandi so you can use a custom domain. If you’re using a different domain provider you may need to use different settings, but Github has plenty of documentation around this that I’ll provide links for. Using Pelican on Windows isn’t that much different than macOS or Linux, but you won’t find as many tutorials or be able to use the quickstart makefile.

Github Pages Setup

The first thing you should do is login to Github and then setup a Github pages repo. You can read more detailed istructions here: https://pages.github.com/ or create a repo that follows the pattern:

I followed a pattern for User Github pages. This will be important when publishing with Pelican.

https://help.github.com/articles/user-organization-and-project-pages/

Pelican Local

With that out of the way we want to move on to setting up our project on Windows. I’m using Anaconda and I will be creating a new conda environment for this project.

The main thing to pay attention to when you go through the quickstart prompts is that you won’t need or be able to use the makefile with Windows. Once you have completed the quikstart there are a couple things to pay attention to.

  1. Your articles should be markdown documents in the content folder.
  2. pelicanconf.py contains various settings related to you blog.
  3. publishconf.py can be left alone because we are using ghp-import

Publishing

Go ahead and create a file under content. Something like gettingstarted.md and add some text. Once you’ve done that switch back to the terminal prompt.

Custom Domain URL

Ok, now that we have Github setup and we can see our blog pages I want to look at the steps required to use my custom domain hosted by Gandi with the Github pages. With Gandi we want to modify our A Records to allow routing to Github. Logging into your Gandi dashboard, select domains from the menu and then DNS records. On this page you should be able to edit your DNS record and add the following:

https://wiki.gandi.net/en/dns/zone/a-record

Ok finally navigate back to your Github repo and go to the settings page. Under settings scroll down until you see Github pages. You should see a textbox allowing you to enter a custom domain. Add that, and if possible I recommend checking the enforce https box below this.

Wrapping Up

With that done you should be good to go. Whenever you want to write a new article create a markdown document in the content folder and follow the same steps above for publishing. One last note if this doesn’t work immediately you might want to wait before beginning to change settings since your A record changes can take some time to replicate.