# Quickstart

Reading through all the documentation is highly recommended, but for the truly impatient, following are some quick steps to get started.

## Installation

Install Pelican (and optionally Markdown if you intend to use it) on Python 3.6+ by running the following command in your preferred terminal, prefixing with `sudo` if permissions warrant:

    python -m pip install "pelican[markdown]"

## Create a project

First, choose a name for your project, create an appropriately-named directory for your site, and switch to that directory:

    mkdir -p ~/projects/yoursite
    cd ~/projects/yoursite

Create a skeleton project via the `pelican-quickstart` command, which begins by asking some questions about your site:

    pelican-quickstart

For questions that have default values denoted in brackets, feel free to use the Return key to accept those default values 1. When asked for your URL prefix, enter your domain name as indicated (e.g., `https://example.com`).

## Create an article

You cannot run Pelican until you have created some content. Use your preferred text editor to create your first article with the following content:

    Title: My First Review
    Date: 2010-12-03 10:20
    Category: Review

    Following is a review of my favorite mechanical keyboard.

Given that this example article is in Markdown format, save it as `~/projects/yoursite/content/keyboard-review.md`.

## Generate your site

From your project root directory, run the `pelican` command to generate your site:

    pelican content

Your site has now been generated inside the `output/` directory. (You may see a warning related to feeds, but that is normal when developing locally and can be ignored for now.)

## Preview your site

Open a new terminal session, navigate to your project root directory, and run the following command to launch Pelican’s web server:

    pelican --listen

Preview your site by navigating to http://localhost:8000/ in your browser.

Continue reading the other documentation sections for more detail, and check out the Pelican wiki’s Tutorials page for links to community-published tutorials.

## Footnotes

1

  You can help localize default fields by installing the optional tzlocal module.