Pelican is a static site generator, written in Python, that allows you to create web sites by composing text files in formats such as Markdown, reStructuredText, and HTML.

With Pelican, you can create web sites without worrying about databases or server-side programming. Pelican generates static sites that can be served via any web server or hosting service.

You can perform the following functions with Pelican:

• Compose content in Markdown or reStructuredText using your editor of choice
• Simple command-line tool (re)generates HTML, CSS, and JS from your source content
• Easy to interface with version control systems and web hooks
• Completely static output is simple to host anywhere

Pelican’s feature highlights include:

• Chronological content (e.g., articles, blog posts) as well as static pages
• Integration with external services
• Site themes (created using Jinja2 templates)
• Publication of articles in multiple languages
• Generation of Atom and RSS feeds
• Code syntax highlighting via Pygments
• Import existing content from WordPress, Dotclear, or RSS feeds
• Fast rebuild times due to content caching and selective output writing
• Extensible via a rich plugin ecosystem: Pelican Plugins

Check out the Pelican documentation for further information.

See our contribution submission and feedback guidelines.

Pelican’s source code is hosted on GitHub. For information on how it works, have a look at Pelican's internals.

“Pelican” is an anagram of calepin, which means “notebook” in French.