Getting Started

This quick tutorial will show you how to create a simple blog with PieCrust.

If you’re already an experienced cook, here’s the rundown:

virtualenv pcenv
<activate pcenv>
pip install piecrust --pre
chef init mywebsite
cd mywebsite
chef prepare post my-first-post
chef serve
chef bake

Installation

The first step is obviously to get PieCrust installed on your machine.

You’ll need Python 3.4 at least for this. Note that it can live side by side with Python 2.x. On Windows or MacOSX, you can use the official Python installer. On main Linux distros, you can use your system’s package manager to install it. If you’re on a more obscure system, or if you want to use alternative means like Homebrew or something, you probably don’t need help for this!

Now we can start running in a command line. On MacOSX, that’s the Terminal app, and on Windows that’s the Command Prompt.

Global installation

Python 3 comes with a package manager called pip, with which you can install, update, and uninstall Python programs like PieCrust. Just run:

pip install piecrust --pre

This will install PieCrust globally on your system. You may want to install it using a virtual environment instead, though. See the next section for that.

Permission Errors

If you get some permission errors, you may have to run that command as an administrator. That would be sudo pip install piecrust --pre on MacOSX and Linux, or running the Command Prompt as an Administrator on Windows.

You should now have PieCrust installed! You can check that it works by typing:

chef --version

If everything’s fine it should print 3.0.2+32.1a214de1e1f7 (the latest version as of this writing).

Using virtual environements

Although very straightforward, the previous section installs PieCrust globally on your system. This may be OK, but could also cause problems if you have other Python software that share dependencies with PieCrust, but with different versions. And then there’s the issue of installing PieCrust in environments in which you don’t have administrator access.

Thankfully, pip supports a whole variety of scenarios, and another utility, called virtualenv enables even more of them.

• If you don’t have it yet, install virtualenv with pip install virtualenv, or check with your administrators to have it. Most web hosts provide it.
• Run virtualenv pcenv. This will create a directory called pcenv that contains a whole new Python environment, separate from your system’s Python environment.
• Activate that environment with sh pcenv/bin/activate.sh (on Linux or MacOSX) or pcenv\Scripts\activate (on Windows). The new environment will now be active for as long as your current command prompt is active.
• Now install PieCrust with pip install piecrust --pre. This will install it in that environment, leaving your system’s Python clean of any of PieCrust’s dependencies.

Create an empty website

The chef command is the main PieCrust utility. You can read about it on the command-line overview page. The first thing to do is to ask it to create a basic website structure:

chef init mywebsite

This should create a directory called mywebsite. There should be a config.yml file in there. Get into that directory:

cd mywebsite

Once you’re inside a website’s root directory, the chef command will be able to do a lot of different things.

Create new content

Let’s start by creating a new page:

chef prepare page about-me

It will tell you that it just created a file named pages/about-me.md. Go ahead and edit that in your favorite text editor, and write some text, or change the title that was defined for you in the header part. For more information on writing content, see the documentation about creating pages.

Now let’s write a blog post:

chef prepare post my-new-blog

It will again tell you about the file it just created. This time it’s in theposts folder, and has a name that follows some date/title kind of naming convention. You don’t have to use chef prepare to create content for your website, but for things like blog posts it’s a lot easier to let it insert today’s date in the filename.

Preview content

Time to preview what we just did! Simply type:

chef serve

Open your favorite web browser and navigate to the URL that chef is listening on, which by default is localhost:8080. You should see some placeholder text along with today’s blog post that you just created, with a simple barebones theme.

Alternate port

If you already have some other things running on port 8080, you can tell PieCrust to use a different one with the -p option.

The about-me page isn’t shown because you’re looking at the index page, but you would see it if you navigated to localhost:8080/about-me.

Bake and publish

Now it’s time to bake this new site and publish it somewhere. There are many ways to do that, as shown in the documentation about baking, but here’s a quick way. Run:

chef bake

This will bake the website into static files, stored under the _counter directory. At this point, you can upload all the contents of that directory to your web server. When that’s done, you should be able to see the exact same website being served from there.

That’s it! This is an extremely quick tour of PieCrust. Read the documentation to learn more.