Pelican + Gitlab CI/CD + Gitlab Pages

💡I wanted to setup a place for some of my dev notes. For myself, but also to maybe share?

Pelican site setup

Up and running

• Follow steps on docs.getpelican.com
• Create a sample post under /content

If a Makefile was created:

• Run make devserver to serve and regenerate on content change

If not:

• Run pelican content to build
• Run pelican --listen to serve

Theming

• Find a theme on www.pelicanthemes.com
• Follow install steps here

Use Gitlab CI/CD to build and deploy to gitlab.io

Configure pelican to work on gitlab pages

• Change OUTPUTDIR on the Makefile to OUTPUTDIR=$(BASEDIR)/public (or set OUTPUT_PATH on pelicanconf.py), as Gitlab docs state that:

  GitLab always deploys your website from a specific folder called public in your repository.

Setup .gitlab-ci.yml

• Create a requirements.txt with the required dependencies, eg:

Markdown==3.2.2
pelican==4.5.4

• Create a .gitlab-ci.yml at the project's root, with a minimal script like:

image: python:3.7.0

pages:
    stage: deploy
    script:
    - apt-get update -qq && apt-get install -y -qq python python-pip
    - pip install -r requirements.txt
    - make html
    - make publish
    artifacts:
        paths:
            - public/
    only:
    - master

Deploy!

Note: Gitlab docs also require the repo name to be username.gitlab.io, for it's artifact to be deployed to gitlab pages.

Another note: The repo needs to be public for this to work, BUT it can be set up like this: Just make sure Pages is set to Everyone with access.

• Commit and push to master 💪
• Then, look for a new pipeline execution under the CI/CD tab on Gitlab.