Lilac

Lilac is a MIT Licensed static blog generator, written in Python. It's fast, simple enough and easy to use.

Latest version: v0.3.8

Documentation is already on readthedocs: English Version, 简体中文版本

News about lilac is here: http://lilac.hit9.org/

Note: If you are looking for a small and fast one, check out rux

Features

• TOML and GFM based.
• 100% in Python (any linux distribution comes with python)
• Built-in Tags & Feed & Theme & Code Highlighting support
• We use Jinja2 to render templates.
• No categories, only tags. (It's A GOOD FEATURE!)
• Minimal configuration.

Demo Sites

• Lilac News, repo: https://github.com/hit9/lilac-website/tree/gh-pages

• Make Difference, repo: https://github.com/hit9/lilac-theme-less/tree/gh-pages

Install

$ mkdir MyBlog
$ cd MyBlog
$ virtualenv venv
New python executable in venv/bin/python
Installing setuptools............done.
Installing pip...............done.
$ . venv/bin/activate
$ pip install lilac

Installation troubles:

• cann't find Python.h. Solution: install python-dev package (on ubuntu: sudo apt-get install python-dev. There's no such issue on OSX)

Sample Post

A post is made up of two parts: header and body.

The header is in TOML and body is in Github Flavored Markdown, the two parts are separated with a '---' like separator.

title = "Hello World"
datetime = "2013-06-05 19:38"
tags = ["sample", "some-tag"]
----------

# Here is markdown content

Commands

To deploy a new blog in new-created directory:

$ lilac deploy

To build site from source to htmls:

$ lilac build

To remove all htmls lilac built:

$ lilac clean

To start a simple HTTP server:

$ lilac serve

To watch source changes the same time when the cute web server running:

$ lilac serve --watch

When you save your writings, lilac can detect the changes and start rebuilding.

Themes

You really should manage your theme in a standalone git repository, and use it as a submodule of your blog's submodule if your blog is under git versioning too.

For instance, add theme less a submodule of your blog's repo:

$ git submodule add git://github.com/hit9/lilac-theme-less.git less

If you want to modify a theme created by someone else, just fork his(or her) repo, and then modify it.

But it's 100% ok to use themes not in the submodule way.

Theme list:

• classic - by @hit9
• less - a clean theme for lilac. by @hit9 (now it's the default theme)
• pure - a clean theme for lilac by @kshiftlv

Have you made one? Please send a pull request on lila's repo, append yours to this list.

Tools

• ililac - a tool to run lilac's server and rebuilder in the background(included in v0.3.7):

  $ cd myblog
  $ ililac start

  to stop the daemon:

  $ ililac stop

  With this tool, we can write blog with at most one shell session.

Documents

• English version: https://lilac.readthedocs.org/

• 简体中文版本: https://lilac-zh.readthedocs.org

Help Us

Found a bug? Have a good idea for improving Lilac? You can fork lilac's repo and then send a feature pull request, or you can open a new issue to report bugs, that will help all users. Welcome for your feedback.