fabric4pelican

A http://fabfile.org to automate the intial creation of a blog post and manage the workflow for http://docs.getpelican.com static blog

Heavily influenced by http://stackful-dev.com/easier-pelican-blogging-with-fabric-automation.html

Installing

➜  fabric4pelican git:(master) virtualenv venv
New python executable in venv/bin/python
Installing setuptools............done.
Installing pip...............done.
➜  fabric4pelican git:(master) ✗ source venv/bin/activate
(venv)➜  fabric4pelican git:(master) ✗ pip install -Ur requirements.txt
...
...
...
Successfully installed Django Fabric Jinja2 Pygments Unidecode
blinker docutils feedgenerator paramiko pelican
pycrypto pytz six unicode-slugify
Cleaning up...

Use

Generate a new post:

(venv)➜  fabric4pelican git:(master) ✗ fab new_post:title="New Post With Fabric Script"
Rendering: blog-post-template.rst to rst/new-post-with-fabric-script.rst

Done.

Preview blog's index

This launches Firefox (my default browser) and displays my blog's homepage locally. This allows me to ensure everything looks as I'd expect before publishing it.

venv)➜  fabric4pelican git:(master) ✗ fab preview

Publish to Amazon's S3 (yes I hard coded paths):

venv)➜  fabric4pelican git:(master) ✗ fab publish

A Note: I'm using S3cmd installed via system packages on my Ubuntu machines. You can also install S3 via PIP.

Note

It should be noted that my source files are in '~/blog/rst'. THIS IS NOT THE DEFAULT DIRECTORY FOR PELICAN. and you may want to edit as needed.

Why?

I've always wanted to use Fabric, but I'll admit it is often easier to knock out a quick/dirty bash script and be on my way. The problem with this is I often have to resort back to `history` to find what I did. This takes away some of the common tasks when trying to write a new blog post. This was also an opportunity for me to gain exposure to Fabric. I could have also extended the MakeFile that exists. Great thing about technology, almost always more than one way to do something.