Lightning is a static blogging engine designed to make it painless to author and update large blogs. Key features are:
- Standalone content directory.
- Incremental building.
- Easy-to-author configuration.
- Use your favorite editor for everything.
Here's a preview of publishing using lightning once you're set up.
- Clone the repository via
git clone git@github.com:borismus/lightning.git
- Run
cd lightning
to get to your newly cloned repository. - Install all required dependencies by running
pip install -r requirements.txt
. - Run
./lightning
to build and./lightning preview
to run a webserver. - Open http://localhost:8000 in your browser.
Build incrementally.
> ./lightning
Forcibly rebuild everything regardless of whether or not there have been changes made to the content. This is useful if you change your template.
> ./lightning rebuild
Start watching for local changes to the content, rebuilding incrementally based on that.
> ./lightning watch
Start a really simple local web server with its document root pointing to the output directory.
> ./lightning preview
lightning.yaml
specifies where to look for content, template and where to dump output.site.yaml
in your content directory specifies site-specific configuration.
I use a combination of Dropbox and Lightning (which uses inotify-tools) to make for a pleasant blogging experience. Here are the steps to get Lightning working on your server.
- Install Dropbox on your server.
- Install Lightning on your server (see above).
- Customize your theme.
- Configure
lightning.yaml
to look for your content on Dropbox (eg.~/Dropbox/my-blog/
) - Setup a watcher on your server via
lightning watch
. It's useful to run the watcher usingnohup
. - Make some changes to your content directory from any Dropbox client (I sometimes use Nebulous on iPad).
- You're done.