# Tips

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

## Custom 404 Pages

When a browser requests a resource that the web server cannot find, the web server usually displays a generic “File not found” (404) error page that can be stark and unsightly. One way to provide an error page that matches the theme of your site is to create a custom 404 page (not an article), such as this Markdown-formatted example stored in `content/pages/404.md`:

    Title: Not Found
    Status: hidden
    Save_as: 404.html

    The requested item could not be located. Perhaps you might want to check
    the [Archives](/archives.html)?

The next step is to configure your web server to display this custom page instead of its default 404 page. For Nginx, add the following to your configuration file’s `location` block:

    error_page 404 /404.html;

For Apache:

    ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

For Amazon S3, first navigate to the `Static Site Hosting` menu in the bucket settings on your AWS cosole. From there:

    Error Document: 404.html

## Publishing to GitHub

GitHub Pages offer an easy and convenient way to publish Pelican sites. There are two types of GitHub 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 a Project Page 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, which can be installed with `pip`, makes this process really easy.

For example, if the source of your Pelican site is contained in a GitHub repository, and if you want to publish that Pelican site in the form of Project Pages to this repository, you can then use the following:

    $ pelican content -o output -s pelicanconf.py
    $ ghp-import output -b gh-pages
    $ 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 (and the `gh_pages` task of `tasks.py`) created by the `pelican-quickstart` command publishes the Pelican site as Project Pages, as described above.

### User Pages

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

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

    $ pelican content -o output -s pelicanconf.py
    $ ghp-import output -b gh-pages
    $ git push git@github.com:elemoine/elemoine.github.io.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.io` repository’s `master` branch on GitHub.

Note

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

Another option for publishing to User Pages is to generate the output files in the root directory of the project.

For example, your main project folder is `<username>.github.io` and you can create the Pelican project in a subdirectory called `Pelican`. Then from inside the `Pelican` folder you can run:

    $ pelican content -o .. -s pelicanconf.py

Now you can push the whole project `<username>.github.io` to the master branch of your GitHub repository:

    $ git push origin master

(assuming origin is set to your remote repository).

### Custom 404 Pages

GitHub Pages will display the custom 404 page described above, as noted in the relevant GitHub docs.

### Update your site on each commit

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

### Copy static files to the root of your site

To use a custom domain with GitHub Pages, you need to put the domain of your site (e.g., `blog.example.com`) inside a `CNAME` file at the root of your site. To do this, create the `content/extra/` directory and add a `CNAME` file to it. Then use the `STATIC_PATHS` setting to tell Pelican to copy this file to your output directory. For example:

    STATIC_PATHS = ['images', 'extra/CNAME']
    EXTRA_PATH_METADATA = {'extra/CNAME': {'path': 'CNAME'},}

Note: use forward slashes, `/`, even on Windows.

You can also use the `EXTRA_PATH_METADATA` mechanism to place a `favicon.ico` or `robots.txt` at the root of any site.

## How to add YouTube or Vimeo Videos

The easiest way is to paste the embed code of the video from these sites directly into your source content.

Alternatively, you can also use Pelican plugins like `liquid_tags`, `pelican_youtube`, or `pelican_vimeo` to embed videos in your content.

Moreover, markup languages like reST and Markdown have plugins that let you embed videos in the markup. You can use reST video directive for reST or mdx_video plugin for Markdown.

## Develop Locally Using SSL

Here’s how you can set up your local pelican server to support SSL.

First, create a self-signed certificate and key using `openssl` (this creates `cert.pem` and `key.pem`):

    $ openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout key.pem -out cert.pem -days 365 -nodes

And use this command to launch the server (the server starts within your `output` directory):

    python -m pelican.server 8443 --key=../key.pem --cert=../cert.pem

If you are using `develop-server.sh`, add this to the top:

    CERT="$BASEDIR/cert.pem"
    KEY="$BASEDIR/key.pem"

and modify the `pelican.server` line as follows:

    $PY -m pelican.server $port --ssl --cert="$CERT" --key="$KEY" &