EaRS Site Configuration Files

The University of Edinburgh Embedded and Robotics Society website source is here. The website is built using Pelican 3.7.1.

Prerequisites

• Git
• Python
• Pelican >= 3.7
• markdown

To install these, you can run the following commands:

sudo apt-get install python3 git
pip install pelican markdown

Getting Started

Clone the repository

You can do this your preferred way, or if you've never done it before, head to the directory above where you want the site files to be stored and then run:

git clone https://github.com/ears-edi/earssite

This will create a folder called earssite and place all of the content in the repository in there.

Generating site

To generate the static site itself, just run pelican in the earssite directory.

Contributing to ears-edi.github.io

If you are developing with the intention of publishing to ears-edi.github.io then make sure to clone the pages repo into earssite before you run pelican.

cd earssite
git clone https://github.com/ears-edi/ears-edi.github.io

This way you can just push any changes from that repo and they will appear on the actual site.

Project Structure

The important files in the project are layed out as so:

Key:
 - file
 \ subdirectory

earssite
 \ content                # static pages and events go in here
   - events               # we are using the posts feature to implement events
   \ pages
     - static pages       # stuff like about, contact etc
 \ pelican-blue
   \ static               # all non template files (styles, scripts, images)
     \ css
     \ images
   \ templates            # HTML templates
     - Jinja templates
 - pelicanconf.py         # pelican settings
 - event_example.md       # an example event posting that can be used as a template

Tips

While developing, try running pelican -r in a separate terminal. This will rebuild the site every time you make a change.

Pelican comes by default with a development server. You can start it using develop-server.sh but this will put the server in the background of your session and any time a request comes in it will spam your terminal which can mess with whatever you are doing currently. It can be better to run python -m pelican.server in the output directory in a separate terminal. This will show you all requests coming in and will serve whatever is in the directory, so doesn't need to be restarted on code changes. You can then see the site at localhost:8000.

The Pelican docs are really very good and cover most if not everything that you would want to do with Pelican.