Pelican on OpenBSD

The following guide will to be to install Pelican on OpenBSD and using httpd. Pelican is a static site generator, written in Python, that requires no database or server-side logic.

If we were to develop the website on a separate box or workstation, the static site could be served and managed using only things included with OpenBSD base. In this case, the development model would look like the following:

Write pages locally
Run pelican content
Tar the projects/<your project name>/output directory
Scp the tar to the web server box
Untar into /var/www/htdocs/

Of course you should test on a demo box before deploying to production, so that is encouraged to add those steps in there.

Install Pelican

pkg_add -v pelican

Depending upon your theme and plugin choices, the next step is optional. Read the README or descriptions to know what you need.

pkg_add -v py3-pip
ln -sf /usr/local/bin/pip3.6 /usr/local/bin/pip
pip install typogrify beautifulsoup4

Add this point Pelican is installed and ready to be used. Reference the documentation to get started, the quickstart section is very helpful.

Next follow the following guide (Archive link) to get LetsEncrypt certs for use with httpd.

The following is my /etc/httpd.conf file after getting the cert initially:

prefork 6

server "www.daulton.ca" {
	listen on * tls port 443
	root "/htdocs/daulton.ca"
	tls {
			certificate "/etc/ssl/daulton.ca.fullchain.pem"
			key "/etc/ssl/private/daulton.ca.key"
	}
	location * {
			block return 301 "https://daulton.ca$REQUEST_URI"
	}
}

server "daulton.ca" {
	listen on * tls port 443
	tls {
			certificate "/etc/ssl/daulton.ca.fullchain.pem"
			key "/etc/ssl/private/daulton.ca.key"
	}
	location "/.well-known/acme-challenge/*" {
			root { "/acme", strip 2 }
	}
}

server "www.daulton.ca" {
	listen on * port 80
	alias "daulton.ca"
	block return 301 "https://daulton.ca$REQUEST_URI"
}

Enable and then start httpd

rcctl enable httpd
rcctl start httpd

Note: I recommend first getting things up and running where you are able to access a test page before trying to add a theme. After you get to that point successfully take a look at the following resources:

To make the demo deployment workflow quicker, I made the following script simply called publish.sh it may help you:

#!/bin/sh

homeDir=/home/daulton
projectURL=daulton.ca

rm -rf /var/www/htdocs/"$projectURL"/*
rm -rf "$homeDir"/projects/"$projectURL"/output/*
cd "$homeDir"/projects/"$projectURL"
pelican content
cp -R "$homeDir"/projects/"$projectURL"/output/* /var/www/htdocs/"$projectURL"
cp -R "$homeDir"/projects/"$projectURL"/images/ /var/www/htdocs/"$projectURL"
cp -R "$homeDir"/projects/"$projectURL"/documents/ /var/www/htdocs/"$projectURL"
chown -R www:www /var/www/htdocs/"$projectURL"

For working from your workstation and then copying the generated content to the web server for deployment here is another script:

#!/bin/sh

homeDir=/home/daulton/Files
projectURL=daulton.ca
sshUser=jeff
serverIP=45.56.45.124

rm -rf "$homeDir"/projects/"$projectURL"/output/*
cd "$homeDir"/projects/"$projectURL"
pelican content
cp "$homeDir"/projects/"$projectURL"/robots.txt "$homeDir"/projects/"$projectURL"/output/
cp -R "$homeDir"/projects/"$projectURL"/images/ "$homeDir"/projects/"$projectURL"/output/
cp -R "$homeDir"/projects/"$projectURL"/documents/ "$homeDir"/projects/"$projectURL"/output/
tar czfp /tmp/"$projectURL".tgz -C "$homeDir"/projects/"$projectURL"/output/ .

scp /tmp/"$projectURL".tgz "$sshUser"@"$serverIP":/tmp
ssh "$sshUser"@"$serverIP" "mkdir /tmp/$projectURL && tar xzf /tmp/"$projectURL".tgz -C /tmp/$projectURL"

echo
echo "Type: doas cp -R /tmp/$projectURL/* /var/www/htdocs/daulton.ca"
echo
ssh "$sshUser"@"$serverIP"

The following is my pelicanconf.py as an example and reference:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- #
from __future__ import unicode_literals

AUTHOR = 'Daulton'
SITENAME = 'Nix, Scripts, and Documentation'
SITEURL = 'https://daulton.ca'
DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU = 'True'
MENUITEMS = (('Main', SITEURL),)
SITETITLE = 'Nix, Scripts, and Documentation'
SITESUBTITLE = 'Powered by Pelican, OpenBSD, and OpenBSD httpd'
SITEDESCRIPTION = 'Nix, Scripts, and Documentation' 

PLUGIN_PATHS = ['plugins']
PLUGINS = ['sitemap', 'extract_toc', 'tipue_search']
DIRECT_TEMPLATES = (('index', 'tags', 'categories','archives', 'search', '404'))
STATIC_PATHS = ['theme/images', 'images']
TAG_SAVE_AS = ''
CATEGORY_SAVE_AS = ''
AUTHOR_SAVE_AS = ''
DEFAULT_CATEGORY = 'Default'

THEME = 'theme/elegant'
PATH = 'content'
TIMEZONE = 'Canada/Central'
COPYRIGHT_YEAR = 2018
DEFAULT_LANG = 'English'

# Feed generation is usually not desired when developing
FEED_ALL_ATOM = None
CATEGORY_FEED_ATOM = None
TRANSLATION_FEED_ATOM = None
AUTHOR_FEED_ATOM = None
AUTHOR_FEED_RSS = None

# Social widget
SOCIAL = (('github', 'https://github.com/jeekkd'),
		('envelope','mailto:contact_daulton@pm.me')) 

# Elegant Labels
SOCIAL_PROFILE_LABEL = u'Stay in Touch'
RELATED_POSTS_LABEL = 'Keep Reading'
SHARE_POST_INTRO = 'Like this post? Share on:'

DEFAULT_PAGINATION = 10

# Landing page
LANDING_PAGE_ABOUT = { 'title': 'Welcome!', 
'details': """<div> This is a documentation based blog for Linux, *BSD, shell scripting, and documentation I write on various topics.

Take a look at the menu for links to the major topics, such as Shell Scripts, Guides, or BASH Guides! </div>""" }

Pelican on OpenBSD

See Also: