title: Generating Static Websites with Pelican, Jinja2 and Markdown

slug: generating-static-websites-pelican-jinja2-markdown

meta: Learn how to generate static websites with Python, the Pelican static site generator, Jinja2 and Markdown.

category: post

date: 2017-05-31

modified: 2017-05-31

headerimage: /img/170531-static-sites-pelican/header.jpg

headeralt: Pelican, Jinja2 and Markdown logos.

[Pelican](/pelican.html) is an incredibly well-built Python tool for

[generating static sites](/static-site-generator.html).

[Full Stack Python](https://www.fullstackpython.com/) is built with Pelican,

[Jinja2 templates](/jinja2.html) and [Markdown](/markdown.html).

This site is deployed to Amazon S3 and currently handles over one hundred

thousand readers per month. There are never scaling concerns because a static

site is pre-generated before deployment and a web server simply responds

with existing files rather than executing any code on the server during

the HTTP request-response cycle.

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a basic static site that you

can further customize and expand with your own design and content.

This tutorial will with with either [Python 2 or 3](/python-2-or-3.html),

but Python 3 is strongly recommended for new applications. I used

[Python 3.6.1](https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-361/) to

write this post. In addition to Python, throughout this tutorial we

will also use the following

[application dependencies](/application-dependencies.html):

* [pelican](/pelican.html)

[static site generator](/static-site-generator.html),

[version 3.7.1](https://github.com/getpelican/pelican/releases/tag/3.7.1)

* [markdown](/markdown.html) parsing library to handle Markdown as a content

input format, version

[2.6.8](https://github.com/waylan/Python-Markdown/releases/tag/2.6.8-final)

* [jinja2](/jinja2.html), a Python [template engine](/template-engines.html),

version [2.9.6](https://github.com/pallets/jinja/releases/tag/2.9.6)

* [pip](https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/) and

[virtualenv](https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/latest/), which come

packaged with Python 3, to install and isolate the Pelican, Markdown,

and Jinja2 libraries from any of your other Python projects

If you need help getting your

[development environment](/development-environments.html) configured, take a

look at

[this guide for setting up Python 3 and Flask on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS](/blog/python-3-flask-green-unicorn-ubuntu-1604-xenial-xerus.html)

All code in this blog post is available open source under the MIT license

on GitHub under the

[generating-static-websites-pelican-jinja2-markdown directory of the blog-code-examples repository](https://github.com/fullstackpython/blog-code-examples).

Use and abuse the source code as you like for your own applications.

Start by creating a new virtual environment for your project.

python3 -m venv

<img src="/img/170531-static-sites-pelican/activate-virtualenv.png" width="100%" class="technical-diagram img-rounded" style="border:1px solid #ccc" alt="Create and activate the Python virtual environment.">

Install the appropriate dependencies after your virtualenv is activated.

The text `(staticsite)` should be prepended to your command prompt. Install

the Pelican and Markdown Python libraries. Jinja2 will also be installed

because Pelican specifies it as a dependency.

pip install pelican==3.7.1 markdown==2.6.8

Run the command and after everything is installed you should see output

similar to the following "Sucessfully installed" message.

Installing collected packages: pygments, pytz, six, feedgenerator, blinker, unidecode, MarkupSafe, jinja2, python-dateutil, docutils, pelican, markdown

Running setup.py install for feedgenerator ... done

Running setup.py install for blinker ... done

Running setup.py install for MarkupSafe ... done

Running setup.py install for markdown ... done

Successfully installed MarkupSafe-1.0 blinker-1.4 docutils-0.13.1 feedgenerator-1.9 jinja2-2.9.6 markdown-2.6.8 pelican-3.7.1 pygments-2.2.0 python-dateutil-2.6.0 pytz-2017.2 six-1.10.0 unidecode-0.4.20

Now that our dependencies are installed we can start building our

static site.

Create a new directory for your project. My site will contain some of my

favorite [retro synthwave](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYRZV8dV10w)

artists as examples, but of course your site can contain whatever subjects

that you want.

You just generated your first [Pelican](/pelican.html) static website using

[Markdown](/markdown.html) and [Jinja2](/jinja2.html). Next you can

make additional modifications to the Jinja2 templates, build new pages and

add more content via Markdown files.

Looking to get even more advanced with Pelican? Check out the open source

[Full Stack Python code](https://github.com/mattmakai/fullstackpython.com)

to see how a fairly large 100+ pages and 100,000+ words site can be built.

Questions? Let me know via

[a GitHub issue ticket on the Full Stack Python repository](https://github.com/mattmakai/fullstackpython.com/issues),

on Twitter

or [@mattmakai](https://twitter.com/mattmakai).

See something wrong in this blog post? Fork

[this page's source on GitHub](https://github.com/mattmakai/fullstackpython.com/blob/master/content/posts/170531-static-sites-pelican.markdown)

and submit a pull request.