One of the many good reasons I chose Pelican as a static blog site generator was because I felt confident I could deploy and use the tools under Windows, with Cygwin. What I couldn’t find was any reference to success installing Pelican under Cygwin. It turns out that the combination is not difficult to make work. Here is my success story installing Pelican under Cygwin.

Prerequisites

• Windows – hopefully obvious.
• Cygwin – also hopefully obvious
• Cygwin Ports [¹]
• and the following Cygwin Packages:
  • git
  • python
  • python-setuptools

Procedure

Installing Pelican under Cygwin ended up being fairly straight forward. I encountered one small problem: some of Pelican’s dependencies would not install from source. This is easily circumvented by using the equivalent Cygwin_ packages. With out further ado.

1. Install Pelican Dependencies from Cygwin

Pelican Dependencies: http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.4.0/install.html#dependencies

Start Cygwin’s setup-x86.exe [²] to update your installation. Install the following packages, if not already present.

• pypy-jinja2
• pypy-pygments
• python-docutils
• python-pytz
• python-six
• pypy-markupsafe
• pypy-dateutil

2. Complete using the command line

Start a cygwin terminal window and use command line tools to complete the installation. If you do not already have pip http://pip.readthedocs.org/ installed, use easy_install, from python-setuptools to install pip.

> easy_install pip
...
> pip install "git+https://github.com/getpelican/pelican.git#egg-pelican"
...
# ... a lot of output as the recursive dependencies are resolved ...
# expect warnings, but a final notice saying pelican was successfully
# installed along with additional, dependent packages.
...
> pelican --help
...
# output consistent with the help from pelican.

Note: Pelican can be simply installed with pip using pip install pelican. I chose to pull Pelican from source so I could stay on their trunk.

Verify

It doesn’t count if it doesn’t work. The following steps are the smoke test I ran to convince myself the installation was working reasonably correct.

> mkdir tmp; cd tmp   # (optional, do what makes sense)
> pelican-quickstart
...
# give reasonable answers
...
> pelican content
...
> ./develop_server start
...

Now, point your favorite web browser at http://localhost:8000/ and the template site should be visible.

Note: my first instinct was to simply point a browser directly at the files generated by Pelican in the output directory; this was only partially successful. I observed the rendered HTML, but no styling; it threw me off for a minute,

So far I have not encountered any problems. Using Windows & Cygwin is always a small adventure for *nix native projects, so I’m … cautiously optimistic.