Tips
####

Here are some tips about Pelican that you might find useful.

Publishing to GitHub
====================

`GitHub Pages <https://help.github.com/categories/20/articles>`_ offer an easy
and convenient way to publish Pelican sites. There are `two types of GitHub
Pages <https://help.github.com/articles/user-organization-and-project-pages>`_:
*Project Pages* and *User Pages*. Pelican sites can be published as both
Project Pages and User Pages.

Project Pages
-------------

To publish a Pelican site as Project Pages you need to *push* the content of
the ``output`` dir generated by Pelican to a repository's ``gh-pages`` branch
on GitHub.

The excellent `ghp-import <https://github.com/davisp/ghp-import>`_, which can
be installed with ``easy_install`` or ``pip``, makes this process really easy.

For example, if the sources of your Pelican site are contained in a GitHub
repository, and if you want to publish your Pelican site as Project Pages of
this repository, you can then use the following::

    $ pelican content -o output -s pelicanconf.py
    $ ghp-import output
    $ git push origin gh-pages

The ``ghp-import output`` command updates the local ``gh-pages`` branch with
the content of the ``output`` directory (creating the branch if it doesn't
already exist). The ``git push origin gh-pages`` command updates the remote
``gh-pages`` branch, effectively publishing the Pelican site.

.. note::

    The ``github`` target of the Makefile created by the ``pelican-quickstart``
    command publishes the Pelican site as Project Pages as described above.

User Pages
----------

To publish a Pelican site as User Pages you need to *push* the content of the
``output`` dir generated by Pelican to the ``master`` branch of your
``<username>.github.com`` repository on GitHub.

Again, you can take advantage of ``ghp-import``::

    $ pelican content -o output pelicanconf.py
    $ ghp-import output
    $ git push git@github.com:elemoine/elemoine.github.com.git gh-pages:master

The ``git push`` command pushes the local ``gh-pages`` branch (freshly updated
by the ``ghp-import`` command) to the ``elemoine.github.com`` repository's
``master`` branch on GitHub.

.. note::

    To publish your Pelican site as User Pages feel free to adjust the the
    ``github`` target of the Makefile.

Extra Tips
----------

Tip #1:

To automatically update your Pelican site on each commit you can create
a post-commit hook. For example, you can add the following to
``.git/hooks/post-commit``::

    pelican pelican content -o output pelicanconf.py && ghp-import output && git push origin gh-pages

Tip #2:

To use a `custom domain
<https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-with-pages>`_ with
GitHub Pages you need to have a ``CNAME`` file at the root of your pages. For
that you will add ``CNAME`` file to your ``content``, dir and use the
``FILES_TO_COPY`` setting variable to tell Pelican to copy that file
to the ``output`` dir. For example::

    FILES_TO_COPY = (('extra/CNAME', 'CNAME'),)