Installation on MacOS

This guide will explain to you Pelican and walk you through setting up a development environment by installing it on your MacOS machine.

What is Pelican?

Pelican is a Static Site Generator (SSG), and its name is an anagram of the French word calepin, meaning notebook.

An SSG is a tool that generates a complete static website composed of HTML and CSS files (and sometimes client-side JavaScript). It takes raw data, such as Markdown files, and combines it with templates to create your website.

This method is highly efficient for building websites, particularly blogs. Once you install the tool, all you need to do is write your articles. Simple and effective!

In this post, we’ll guide you through setting up Pelican and getting started.

Installation

Pelican is written in Python, so some familiarity with the language is helpful.

Installing Pelican is straightforward—just a single pip command, and you're ready to go!

Before you begin, it’s a good practice to create a virtual environment. While not required, a virtual environment helps keep project dependencies isolated, preventing conflicts between different projects.

Here’s how to set one up:

mkdir blog
cd blog
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Now, you’re ready to install Pelican using pip:

pip install pelican
# If you plan to write your articles in Markdown, use:
pip install 'pelican[markdown]'

Conclusion

By following these short steps, you've successfully set up Pelican on your development environment. With this tool, you're now ready to start building and managing modern websites efficiently.

Happy me! 🌱