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.

Installation

1. Clone the repository via git clone [email protected]:borismus/lightning.git
2. Run cd lightning to get to your newly cloned repository.
3. Install all required dependencies by running pip install -r requirements.txt.
4. Run ./lightning to build and ./lightning preview to run a webserver.
5. Open http://localhost:8000 in your browser.

Usage

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

Deploy the site to the specified S3 bucket.

> ./lightning deploy

Configuration

lightning.yaml specifies where to look for content, template and where to dump output. It also specifies where to deploy the site.

site.yaml specifies metadata about the site itself, including permalinks, verbs, site title, date format. It belongs in the content root.

For production

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.

0. Install Dropbox on your server.
1. Install Lightning on your server (see above).
2. Customize your theme.
3. Configure lightning.yaml to look for your content on Dropbox (eg. ~/Dropbox/my-blog/)
4. Setup a watcher on your server via lightning watch. It's useful to run the watcher using nohup.
5. Make some changes to your content directory from any Dropbox client (I sometimes use Nebulous on iPad).
6. You're done.

Enjoy.