Nairobi GNU/Linux Users Group Blog

This is the repository which hosts the code for the Nairobi GNU/Linux Users Group blog. We wanted a fun, nerdy and democratic way to give our community an online presence, so here we are.

Wanna Build It?

In order to build this, you need to have Pelican installed. The easiest way to do this is to use Python virtual environments via pyenv and the pyenv-virtualenv plugin.

pyenv quick install

Clone the pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv to your home folder:

$ git clone https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv.git ~/.pyenv
$ git clone https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv-virtualenv.git ~/.pyenv/plugins/pyenv-virtualenv

Add the following snippet to your shell's init script, ie ~/.bashrc:

# Enable pyenv
# See: https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv#basic-github-checkout
if [[ -d ~/.pyenv ]]; then
    export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"
    export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"

    eval "$(pyenv init -)"
    # optionally enable pyenv-virtualenv
    # See: https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv-virtualenv
    if [[ -d ~/.pyenv/plugins/pyenv-virtualenv ]]; then
        eval "$(pyenv virtualenv-init -)"
    fi
fi

This tells your shell to initialize pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv on startup, so close and re-open your shell to activate it.

Create a virtualenv

Once you have pyenv installed, create a virtual environment to hold Pelican and its dependencies:

$ pyenv virtualenv nairobilug
$ pyenv activate nairobilug

This creates a virtual environment and then activates it. If you want to exit the virtual environment, just type deactivate.

Install Pelican & friends

Use pip to install the list of dependencies into your virtual environment:

pip install -r https://raw.github.com/nairobilug/nairobilug.or.ke/master/requirements.txt

Preparations

The theme we're using, pelican-alchemy, is a "git submodule", which means it is maintained as its own separate git repository (with its own git history, project, etc). Submodules are stored in the .gitmodules file, and we first need to initialize and clone it before we can build.

Navigate to where you've cloned this repo and then:

git submodule init
git submodule update

You only need to do the initialization the first time you build. After that, you can simply use the update command to get the latest submodule changes.

GENERATE teh BLAWG

Now that the theme exists, we can build:

pelican content

This takes the Markdown files from the content folder and generates static HTML pages inside the output directory. That's it. No MySQL, no PHP, etc...

It Works, SHIPIT!!1

You can use any web server to view the generated HTML. For example, Python's built-in simple HTTP server:

cd output
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

And now you should see the blog at: http://localhost:8000

Workflow for Blog Posts

If you're interested in writing a blog post for the site, you need to:

Fork the repo
Hack hack hack
Push the changes to your repo; preferably to a topic branch, like why-i-love-linux
Make a pull request against the master branch

Contact

If you have any questions, drop by #nairobilug on Freenode. Happy blogging!

poppingtonic / nairobilug.or.ke