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# 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 >=3.8.1 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.