blohg 0.2

A Mercurial-based blog engine

blohg is a simple and easy to use blog engine, that uses the Mercurial SCM as backend, to store the content of the post and pages.

blohg doesn’t have a nice control panel nor WYSIWIG editors. All the content is written using any text editor and reStructuredText with some custom directives (undocumented yet, please read the docstrings for reference).

Starting your blog

Warning

The sys.prefix on the examples means the prefix value for your current environment (the current value of sys.prefix) and not the python variable itself, obviously.

$ hg init my_blohg
$ cd my_blohg
$ cp -r ``sys.prefix``/share/blohg/config.yaml .
$ mkdir {content,static,templates}
$ $EDITOR config.yaml

Change the configuration values as you want. The variables are pretty obvious and the sample file comes with some useful examples.

The templates (templates/ directory) are handled using Jinja2. Please take a look at my blog repository for an example of how templates are handled. (TODO: expand this)

http://hg.rafaelmartins.eng.br/rafaelmartins.eng.br/

blohg uses a custom Jinja2 template loader, that’s able to load templates directly from the Mercurial repository.

The static/ directory should be used for static files. You should avoid store big files inside the repository.

$ mkdir content/post
$ cat << EOF > content/post/hello_world.rst
Hello World!
============

.. tags: hello_world,my_cool_tag

Hello, blohg!

EOF
$ blohg runserver

Make sure that you run the blohg script from the root of your local repository.

If you’re lucky, you should get your blog at http://localhost:5000/

$ hg commit -Am 'initial commit'

Now copy your repository for the remote server as you want.

When your repository is available on the web server, configure your push path:

$ cat << EOF > .hg/hgrc
[paths]
default = https://[e-mail]/my_blohg/
EOF
$ hg push

Warning

This example DOESN’T cover the Mercurial server configuration!

Deploying your blog (using Apache/mod_wsgi)

$ cp ``sys.prefix``/share/blohg/blohg.wsgi /some/place/
$ $EDITOR /some/place/blohg.wsgi

Read the file and change what you need.

Edit your apache configuration and add something like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    WSGIScriptAlias / /some/place/blohg.wsgi
</VirtualHost>

Have fun! :)

Important notes about writing posts/pages

Tags are handled from a reSTructuredText comment: .. tags:. Tags are comma-separated.

Static pages will not handle tags, then you don’t need the .. tags: comment.

Enjoy!