Building a blog with Pelican and Netlify

It's been more than a year since I last posted on this website. I've been busy and I didn't have something to write about, until now. As I wrote before, I've been running the classic Jekyll/GitHub Pages combo, but I wanted to try something different, something that gave me more control over my website, so I found Pelican.

Similar to Jekyll, Pelican is a static site generator: its output are plain HTML/CSS files that you can upload anywhere, you don't need a backend nor a database. This is great because finding cheap (free) hosting is easy, and Netlify's Started Plan is perfect for this type of websites.

Just like Jekyll, Pelican also supports a wide variety of plugins and themes. The main difference is that Pelican is written in Python, and being a huge Python fan myself, I decided to give it a go. This is the write-up of how I got it working.

1. Setup the project using Poetry

I really like Poetry for managing my dependencies and virtual environments.

You can create a new Poetry project by running:

poetry new new-blog

You can find more information on how to use Poetry by reading the docs.

Now …

more ...