Installing Pelican on OS X is not quite as simple as most things.

I work in linux daily and am a custom to installing and configuring software for various things. apt-install this, yum install that. OS X is a bit different.

Pelican requires python - OS X has python (kind of). It’s really stripped down. I installed pip and pelican and ran quickstart and quickly hit a roadblock of errors.

With a bit of googling, many people suggest using homebrew - I prefer to keep my installs as native as possible but I gave in on this - after all I’m wanting a quick and simple setup to testing things out.

Notes

• I have XCode installed already - if you do not have this installed already doing so would be the 1st step.
• I previously installed pelican and the following did not work until I uninstalled it (pip uninstall pelican) and reinstalled after having homebrew installed.

The Install

• Install pip if you do not already have it installed

sudo easy_install pip

• Install Homebrew:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

• Adjust your ~/.profile

vi ~/.profile

and add

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH

• Now install Python

brew install python

• Install virtualenv

pip install virtualenv

• Finally

virtualenv pelicanvenv

OK that’s everything for the prep work. Now we can actually install Pelican (and markdown)!!

pip install pelican markdown

Now you can create your pelican project and initialize it with:

mkdir my-project
cd my-project
pelican-quickstart

For working with pelican you can read the documentation at http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.5.0/quickstart.html