Pelican-deploy

A deployment daemon for pelican or other static site generators. Features:

• generating from the newest commit of a specified git branch
• cloning of a repository from a remote location and keep it up to date (supports submodules)
• cron like scheduled jobs
• github webhooks
• status page with optional http auth

How it works

You can specify one or multiple runners. Each has a remote git repository (clone_url) specified wich will be cloned to the working directory and a branch (git_branch) within that repository where the HEAD will be generated.

The runners will be triggered either by scheduled jobs or by pushes to the repository. The runners perform basically 3 steps:

1. the repository will be updated to the newest revision (or cloned at first)
2. a command will be run which generates the website (build_command) somewehere under the working directory. (If you rely on a virtualenv you may want to use tox )
3. finally, after 2. completed successfully a command will be invoked (final_install_command) which installs the directory tree into the final location (e.g. the www root). (rsync is a nice tool for this). This procudure should avoid having a broken Website.

Installation

python 3.3+ and git are required.

The remaining dependencies are in requirements.txt, you can do pip install -r requirements.txt (you may want to setup a virtualenv for this, never do this as root).

Running

First copy example_config.py to a place of your choice, then adjust it to your needs.

This program is a WSGI application which can run either standalone or may be integrated into any WGSI compliant web server. For standalone mode, run ./app.py </path/to/config.py> <listen address> <port>. If you want the WSGI app, call init_app(configpath) in app.py.

Github webhooks

Point your github webhook to http://<listen address>:<port>/hooks/github/<runner_name>, you need to define a hook for every runner.

Status Page

Under http://<listen address>:<port>/status/ you will find a status page which informs about the state of the runners and a possibility to manually trigger a runner. May be protected by http basic auth but in production you may want to use a dedicated web server for access control anyway.