pelican-to-sqlite

Create a SQLite database containing data posts from your local pelican files.

How to install

Using uv (recommended)

uv add pelican-to-sqlite

Using pip

pip install pelican-to-sqlite

Usage

Once the plugin has been installed you only need to run make html to create a SQLite database called pelican.db which will be created in the root of your pelican site.

You will need to add a form to your base.html template (or similar template depending on your theme). The form that needs to be added looks like this (assuming you use Tailwind):

<section class="relative h-8">
<section class="absolute inset-y-0 right-10 w-128">
<form
class = "pl-4"
<
action="your-action-link-here"
method="get">
        <label for="site-search">Search the site:</label>
        <input type="search" id="site-search" name="text"
                aria-label="Search through site content">
        <button class="rounded-full w-16 hover:bg-blue-300">Search</button>
</form>
</section>

In the above, your-action-link-here should be substituted for the link that you get from your Vercel hosted instance of datasette.

Deploy using Vercel

There are many options to deploy your SQLite database with datasette. Below describes using Vercel.

Note: The datasette-publish-vercel plugin may have limited maintenance. Consider alternative deployment methods like Datasette Cloud or manual Vercel deployment if you encounter issues.

First, install datasette using uv (or pip)

uv add datasette
# or: pip install datasette

Next, install the datasette plugin datasette-publish-vercel using uv (or pip)

uv add datasette-publish-vercel
# or: pip install datasette-publish-vercel

and the Vercel CLI

Once that's done, run vercel login to login to (or create) an account.

To publish your pelican.db to Vercel just run:

datasette publish vercel my-database.db

There are several options for outputting to Vercel. See the documentation for more details

Using with Datasette

The SQLite database produced by this tool is designed to be browsed using Datasette. See my post Adding Search to My Pelican Blog with Datasette for more details on how I implemented it.