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The Nikola Handbook

Version: 7.8.4

All You Need to Know

After you have Nikola installed:

Create an empty site (with a setup wizard):
nikola init mysite

You can create a site with demo files in it with nikola init --demo mysite

The rest of these commands have to be executed inside the new mysite folder.

Create a post:
nikola new_post
Edit the post:
The filename should be in the output of the previous command. You can also use nikola new_post -e to open an editor automatically.
Build the site:
nikola build
Start the test server and open a browser:
nikola serve -b

That should get you going. If you want to know more, this manual will always be here for you.

DON'T READ THIS MANUAL. IF YOU NEED TO READ IT I FAILED, JUST USE THE THING.

On the other hand, if anything about Nikola is not as obvious as it should be, by all means tell me about it :-)

What's Nikola and what can you do with it?

Nikola is a static website and blog generator. The very short explanation is that it takes some texts you wrote, and uses them to create a folder full of HTML files. If you upload that folder to a server, you will have a rather full-featured website, done with little effort.

Its original goal is to create blogs, but it supports most kind of sites, and can be used as a CMS, as long as what you present to the user is your own content instead of something the user generates.

Nikola can do:

  • A blog (example)
  • Your company's site
  • Your personal site
  • A software project's site (example)
  • A book's site

Since Nikola-based sites don't run any code on the server, there is no way to process user input in forms.

Nikola can't do:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • An Issue tracker
  • Anything with forms, really (except for comments!)

Keep in mind that "static" doesn't mean boring. You can have animations, slides or whatever fancy CSS3/HTML5 thingie you like. It only means all that HTML is generated already before being uploaded. On the other hand, Nikola sites will tend to be content-heavy. What Nikola is good at is at putting what you write out there.

Getting Help

Get help here!

TL;DR:

Why Static?

Most "modern" websites are dynamic in the sense that the contents of the site live in a database, and are converted into presentation-ready HTML only when a user wants to see the page. That's great. However, it presents some minor issues that static site generators try to solve.

In a static site, the whole site, every page, everything, is created before the first user even sees it and uploaded to the server as a simple folder full of HTML files (and images, CSS, etc).

So, let's see some reasons for using static sites:

Security

Dynamic sites are prone to experience security issues. The solution for that is constant vigilance, keeping the software behind the site updated, and plain old good luck. The stack of software used to provide a static site, like those Nikola generates, is much smaller (Just a web server).

A smaller software stack implies less security risk.

Obsolescence

If you create a site using (for example) WordPress, what happens when WordPress releases a new version? You have to update your WordPress. That is not optional, because of security and support issues. If I release a new version of Nikola, and you don't update, nothing happens. You can continue to use the version you have now forever, no problems.

Also, in the longer term, the very foundations of dynamic sites shift. Can you still deploy a blog software based on Django 0.96? What happens when your host stops supporting the PHP version you rely on? And so on.

You may say those are long term issues, or that they won't matter for years. Well, I believe things should work forever, or as close to it as we can make them. Nikola's static output and its input files will work as long as you can install a Python 2.7/3.3 or newer under Linux, Windows, or OS X and can find a server that sends files over HTTP. That's probably 10 or 15 years at least.

Also, static sites are easily handled by the Internet Archive.

Cost and Performance

On dynamic sites, every time a reader wants a page, a whole lot of database queries are made. Then a whole pile of code chews that data, and HTML is produced, which is sent to the user. All that requires CPU and memory.

On a static site, the highly optimized HTTP server reads the file from disk (or, if it's a popular file, from disk cache), and sends it to the user. You could probably serve a bazillion (technical term) page views from a phone using static sites.

Lock-in

On server-side blog platforms, sometimes you can't export your own data, or it's in strange formats you can't use in other services. I have switched blogging platforms from Advogato to PyCs to two homebrew systems, to Nikola, and have never lost a file, a URL, or a comment. That's because I have always had my own data in a format of my choice.

With Nikola, you own your files, and you can do anything with them.

Components

Nikola provides the following features:

  • Blog support, including:
    • Indexes
    • RSS and Atom feeds
    • Tags and categories, with pages and feeds
    • Author pages and feeds (not generated if ENABLE_AUTHOR_PAGES is set to False or there is only one author)
    • Archives with custom granularity (yearly or monthly)
    • Comments
    • Client-side tag clouds (needs manual configuration)
  • Static pages (not part of the blog)
  • Math rendering (via MathJax)
  • Custom output paths for generated pages
  • Pretty URLs (without .html) that don’t need web server support
  • Easy page template customization
  • Internationalization support (my own blog is English and Spanish)
  • Sitemap generation (for search engines)
  • Custom deployment (if it’s a command, you can use it)
  • GitHub Pages deployment
  • Themes, easy appearance customization
  • Multiple input formats, including reStructuredText and Markdown
  • Easy-to-create image galleries
  • Image thumbnail generation
  • Support for displaying source code listings
  • Image slideshows
  • Custom search
  • Asset (CSS/JS) bundling
  • gzip compression (for sending via your web server)
  • Open Graph, Twitter Cards
  • Hyphenation
  • Custom post processing filters (eg. for minifying files or better typography)

Getting Started

To set Nikola up and create your first site, read the Getting Started Guide.

Creating a Blog Post

To create a new post, the easiest way is to run nikola new_post. You will be asked for a title for your post, and it will tell you where the post's file is located.

By default, that file will contain also some extra information about your post ("the metadata"). It can be placed in a separate file by using the -2 option, but it's generally easier to keep it in a single location.

The contents of your post have to be written (by default) in reStructuredText but you can use a lot of different markups using the -f option.

Currently, Nikola supports reStructuredText, Markdown, Jupyter (IPython) Notebooks, HTML as input, can also use Pandoc for conversion, and has support for BBCode, CreoleWiki, txt2tags, Textile and more via plugins — for more details, read the input format documentation. You can learn reStructuredText syntax with the reST quickstart.

Please note that Nikola does not support encodings other than UTF-8. Make sure to convert your input files to that encoding to avoid issues. It will prevent bugs, and Nikola will write UTF-8 output anyway.

You can control what markup compiler is used for each file extension with the COMPILERS option. The default configuration expects them to be placed in posts but that can be changed (see below, the POSTS and PAGES options)

This is how it works:

$ nikola new_post
Creating New Post
-----------------

Title: How to make money
Scanning posts....done!
INFO: new_post: Your post's text is at: posts/how-to-make-money.rst

The content of that file is as follows:

.. title: How to make money
.. slug: how-to-make-money
.. date: 2012-09-15 19:52:05 UTC
.. tags:
.. link:
.. description:
.. type: text

Write your post here.

You can edit these files with your favorite text editor, and once you are happy with the contents, generate the pages using nikola build.

The post page is generated by default using the post.tmpl template, which you can use to customize the output. You can also customize paths and the template filename itself — see How does Nikola decide where posts should go?

Metadata fields

Nikola supports many metadata fields in posts. All of them are translatable and almost all are optional. The meta field format is:

.. name: value

You can add your own metadata fields in the same manner. If you are not using reStructuredText, make sure the fields are in a HTML comment in output.

Basic

title
Title of the post. (required)
slug
Slug of the post. Used as the last component of the page URL. We recommend and default to using a restricted character set (a-z0-9-_) because other symbols may cause issues in URLs. (required)
date
Date of the post, defaults to now. Multiple date formats are accepted. Adding a timezone is recommended. (required for posts)
tags
Comma-separated tags of the post. Some tags have special meaning, including draft, private, mathjax
category
Like tags, except each post can have only one, and they usually have more descriptive names.
guid
String used as GUID in RSS feeds and as ID in Atom feeds instead of the permalink.
link
Link to original source for content. May be displayed by some themes.
description
Description of the post. Used in <meta> tags for SEO.
type
Type of the post. See Post Types for details. Whatever you set here (prepended with post-) will become a CSS class of the <article> element for this post. Defaults to text (resulting in a post-text class)

Extra

author
Author of the post, will be used in the RSS feed and possibly in the post display (theme-dependent)
annotations / noannotations
Override the value of the ANNOTATIONS option for this specific post or page.
enclosure
Add an enclosure to this post when it's used in RSS. See more information about enclosures
data

Path to an external data file (JSON/YAML/TOML dictionary), relative to conf.py. Its keys are available for templates as post.data('key').

Translated posts can have different values for this field, and the correct one will be used.

See The Global Context and Data files for more details. This is especially useful used in combination with shortcodes.

filters
See the Post Processing Filters section.
hidetitle
Set "True" if you do not want to see the page title as a heading of the output html file (does not work for posts).
hyphenate
Set "True" if you want this document to be hyphenated even if you have hyphenation disabled by default.
nocomments
Set to "True" to disable comments. Example:
password

The post will be encrypted and invisible until the reader enters the password. Also, the post's source code will not be available.

WARNING: DO NOT use for real confidential data. The algorithm used (RC4) is insecure. The implementation may also be easily brute-forced. Please consider using something else if you need real encryption!

More information: Issue #1547

pretty_url
Set to "False" to disable pretty URL for this page. Example:
previewimage

Designate a preview or other representative image path relative to BASE_URL for use with Open Graph for posts. Adds the image when sharing on social media and many other uses.

.. previewimage: /images/looks_great_on_facebook.png

The image can be of any size and dimension (services will crop and adapt) but should less than 1 MB and be larger than 300x300 (ideally 600x600).

section
Section for the post (instead of inferring from output path; requires POSTS_SECTION_FROM_META setting)
template

Change the template used to render this page/post specific page. That template needs to either be part of the theme, or be placed in a templates/ folder inside your site.

.. template: story.tmpl

To add these metadata fields to all new posts by default, you can set the variable ADDITIONAL_METADATA in your configuration. For example, you can add the author metadata to all new posts by default, by adding the following to your configuration:

ADDITIONAL_METADATA = {
    'author': 'John Doe'
}

Note

The Two-File Format

Nikola originally used a separate .meta file. That will still work! The format of the meta files is the same as shown above (i.e. only the 7 base fields, in the order listed above), but without the explanations:

How to make money
how-to-make-money
2012-09-15 19:52:05 UTC

However, starting with Nikola v7, you can now use .meta files and put all metadata you want, complete with the explanations — they look just like the beginning of our reST files.

.. title: How to make money
.. slug: how-to-make-money
.. date: 2012-09-15 19:52:05 UTC

Both file formats are supported; however, the new format is preferred, if possible.

Multilingual posts

If you are writing a multilingual site, you can also create a per-language post file (for example: how-to-make-money.es.txt with the default TRANSLATIONS_PATTERN, see below). This one can replace metadata of the default language, for example:

  • The translated title for the post or page
  • A translated version of the page name

The pattern used for finding translations is controlled by the TRANSLATIONS_PATTERN variable in your configuration file.

The default is to put the language code before the file extension, so the German translation of some_file.rst should be named some_file.de.rst. This is because the TRANSLATIONS_PATTERN variable is by default set to:

TRANSLATIONS_PATTERN = "{path}.{lang}.{ext}"

Note

Considered languages

Nikola will only look for translation of input files for languages specified in the TRANSLATIONS variable.

In case you translate your posts, you might also want to adjust various other settings so that the generated URLs match the translation. You can find most places in conf.py by searching for (translatable). For example, you might want to localize /categories/ (search for TAG_PATH), /pages/ and /posts/ (search for POSTS and PAGES, or see the next section), or how to adjust the URLs for subsequent pages for indexes (search for INDEXES_PRETTY_PAGE_URL).

Nikola supports multiple languages for a post (we have almost 50 translations!). If you wish to add support for more languages, check out the Transifex page for Nikola

How does Nikola decide where posts should go?

The place where the post will be placed by new_post (the first one that matches the given format) and the final post destination (the first one that matches a given file) is based on the POSTS and PAGES configuration options. The exact mechanism is explained above the config options in the conf.py file, and also reproduced below:

# POSTS and PAGES contains (wildcard, destination, template) tuples.
#
# The wildcard is used to generate a list of post source files
# (whatever/thing.rst, for example).
#
# That fragment could have an associated metadata file (whatever/thing.meta),
# and optionally translated files (example for Spanish, with code "es"):
#     whatever/thing.es.rst and whatever/thing.es.meta
#
#     This assumes you use the default TRANSLATIONS_PATTERN.
#
# From those files, a set of HTML fragment files will be generated:
# cache/whatever/thing.html (and maybe cache/whatever/thing.html.es)
#
# These files are combined with the template to produce rendered
# pages, which will be placed at
# output/TRANSLATIONS[lang]/destination/pagename.html
#
# where "pagename" is the "slug" specified in the metadata file.
# The page might also be placed in /destination/pagename/index.html
# if PRETTY_URLS are enabled.
#
# The difference between POSTS and PAGES is that POSTS are added
# to feeds, indexes, tag lists and archives and are considered part
# of a blog, while PAGES are just independent HTML pages.
#
# Finally, note that destination can be translated, i.e. you can
# specify a different translation folder per language. Example:
#     PAGES = (
#         ("pages/*.rst", {"en": "pages", "de": "seiten"}, "story.tmpl"),
#         ("pages/*.md", {"en": "pages", "de": "seiten"}, "story.tmpl"),
#     )

POSTS = (
    ("posts/*.rst", "posts", "post.tmpl"),
    ("posts/*.txt", "posts", "post.tmpl"),
    ("posts/*.html", "posts", "post.tmpl"),
)
PAGES = (
    ("pages/*.rst", "pages", "story.tmpl"),
    ("pages/*.txt", "pages", "story.tmpl"),
    ("pages/*.html", "pages", "story.tmpl"),
)

Note

POSTS and PAGES are not flat!

Even if the syntax may suggest you can't, you can create any directory structure you want inside posts/ or pages/ and it will be reflected in the output. For example, posts/foo/bar.txt would produce output/posts/foo/bar.html, assuming the slug is also bar.

If you have PRETTY_URLS enabled, that would be output/posts/foo/bar/index.html.

The new_post command

new_post will use the first path in POSTS (or PAGES if -p is supplied) that ends with the extension of your desired markup format (as defined in COMPILERS in conf.py) as the directory that the new post will be written into. If no such entry can be found, the post won’t be created.

The new_post command supports some options:

$ nikola help new_post
Purpose: create a new blog post or site page
Usage:   nikola new_post [options] [path]

Options:
  -p, --page                Create a page instead of a blog post. (see also: `nikola new_page`)
  -t ARG, --title=ARG       Title for the post.
  -a ARG, --author=ARG      Author of the post.
  --tags=ARG                Comma-separated tags for the post.
  -1                        Create the post with embedded metadata (single file format)
  -2                        Create the post with separate metadata (two file format)
  -e                        Open the post (and meta file, if any) in $EDITOR after creation.
  -f ARG, --format=ARG      Markup format for the post (use --available-formats for list)
  -F, --available-formats   List all available input formats
  -s                        Schedule the post based on recurrence rule
  -i ARG, --import=ARG      Import an existing file instead of creating a placeholder
  -d, --date-path           Create post with date path (eg. year/month/day, see NEW_POST_DATE_PATH_FORMAT in config)

The optional path parameter tells Nikola exactly where to put it instead of guessing from your config. So, if you do nikola new_post posts/random/foo.txt you will have a post in that path, with "foo" as its slug. You can also provide a directory name, in which case Nikola will append the file name for you (generated from title).

The -d, --date-path option automates creation of year/month/day or similar directory structures. It can be enabled on a per-post basis, or you can use it for every post if you set NEW_POST_DATE_PATH = True in conf.py.

# Use date-based path when creating posts?
# Can be enabled on a per-post basis with `nikola new_post -d`.
# NEW_POST_DATE_PATH = False

# What format to use when creating posts with date paths?
# Default is '%Y/%m/%d', other possibilities include '%Y' or '%Y/%m'.
# NEW_POST_DATE_PATH_FORMAT = '%Y/%m/%d'

Teasers

You may not want to show the complete content of your posts either on your index page or in RSS feeds, but to display instead only the beginning of them.

If it's the case, you only need to add a "magical comment" in your post.

In reStructuredText:

.. TEASER_END

In Markdown (or basically, the resulting HTML of any format):

<!-- TEASER_END -->

By default all your RSS feeds will be shortened (they'll contain only teasers) whereas your index page will still show complete posts. You can change this behavior with your conf.py: INDEX_TEASERS defines whether index page should display the whole contents or only teasers. FEED_TEASERS works the same way for your Atom and RSS feeds.

By default, teasers will include a "read more" link at the end. If you want to change that text, you can use a custom teaser:

.. TEASER_END: click to read the rest of the article

You can override the default value for TEASER_END in conf.py — for example, the following example will work for .. more, and will be compatible with both WordPress and Nikola posts:

import re
TEASER_REGEXP = re.compile('<!--\s*(more|TEASER_END)(:(.+))?\s*-->', re.IGNORECASE)

Or you can completely customize the link using the READ_MORE_LINK option.

# A HTML fragment with the Read more... link.
# The following tags exist and are replaced for you:
# {link}        A link to the full post page.
# {read_more}   The string “Read more” in the current language.
# {{            A literal { (U+007B LEFT CURLY BRACKET)
# }}            A literal } (U+007D RIGHT CURLY BRACKET)
# READ_MORE_LINK = '<p class="more"><a href="{link}">{read_more}…</a></p>'

Drafts

If you add a "draft" tag to a post, then it will not be shown in indexes and feeds. It will be compiled, and if you deploy it it will be made available, so use with care. If you wish your drafts to be not available in your deployed site, you can set DEPLOY_DRAFTS = False in your configuration. This will not work if lazily include nikola build in your DEPLOY_COMMANDS.

Also if a post has a date in the future, it will not be shown in indexes until you rebuild after that date. This behavior can be disabled by setting FUTURE_IS_NOW = True in your configuration, which will make future posts be published immediately. Posts dated in the future are not deployed by default (when FUTURE_IS_NOW = False). To make future posts available in the deployed site, you can set DEPLOY_FUTURE = True in your configuration. Generally, you want FUTURE_IS_NOW and DEPLOY_FUTURE to be the same value.

Private Posts

If you add a "private" tag to a post, then it will not be shown in indexes and feeds. It will be compiled, and if you deploy it it will be made available, so it will not generate 404s for people who had linked to it.

Queuing Posts

Some blogs tend to have new posts based on a schedule (for example, every Mon, Wed, Fri) but the blog authors don't like to manually schedule their posts. You can schedule your blog posts based on a rule, by specifying a rule in the SCHEDULE_RULE in your configuration. You can either post specific blog posts according to this schedule by using the --schedule flag on the new_post command or post all new posts according to this schedule by setting SCHEDULE_ALL = True in your configuration. (Note: This feature requires that the FUTURE_IS_NOW setting is set to False)

For example, if you would like to schedule your posts to be on every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7am, add the following SCHEDULE_RULE to your configuration:

SCHEDULE_RULE = 'RRULE:FREQ=WEEKLY;BYDAY=MO,WE,FR;BYHOUR=7;BYMINUTE=0;BYSECOND=0'

For more details on how to specify a recurrence rule, look at the iCal specification. Or if you are scared of this format, many calendaring applications (eg. Google Calendar) offer iCal exports, so you can copy-paste the repeat rule from a generated iCal (.ics) file (which is a human-readable text file).

Say, you get a free Sunday, and want to write a flurry of new posts, or at least posts for the rest of the week, you would run the new_post command with the --schedule flag, as many times as you want:

$ nikola new_post --schedule
# Creates a new post to be posted on Monday, 7am.
$ nikola new_post -s
# Creates a new post to be posted on Wednesday, 7am.
$ nikola new_post -s
# Creates a new post to be posted on Friday, 7am.
.
.
.

All these posts get queued up according to your schedule, but note that you will anyway need to build and deploy your site for the posts to appear online. You can have a cron job that does this regularly.

Post Types

Nikola supports specifying post types, just like Tumblr does. Post types affect the look of your posts, by adding a post-YOURINPUTHERE CSS class to the post. Each post can have one and exactly one type. Nikola styles the following types in the default themes:

Name(s) Description Styling
text plain text — default value standard
micro “small” (short) posts big serif font

Indexes

All your posts that are not drafts, private or dated in the future, will be shown in indexes.

Settings

Indexes are put in the INDEX_PATH directory, which defaults to an empty string (site root). The “main” index is index.html, and all the further indexes are index-*.html, respectively.

By default, 10 posts are displayed on an index page. This can be changed with INDEX_DISPLAY_POST_COUNT. Indexes can show full posts or just the teasers, as controlled by the INDEX_TEASERS setting (defaults to False).

Titles of the pages can be controlled by using INDEXES_TITLES, INDEXES_PAGES and INDEXES_PAGES_MAIN settings.

Categories and tags use simple lists by default that show only titles and dates; however, you can switch them to full indexes by using CATEGORY_PAGES_ARE_INDEXES and TAG_PAGES_ARE_INDEXES, respectively.

Something similar happens with authors. To use full indexes in authors, set AUTHOR_PAGES_ARE_INDEXES to True.

Static indexes

Nikola uses static indexes by default. This means that index-1.html has the oldest posts, and the newest posts past the first 10 are in index-N.html, where N is the highest number. Only the page with the highest number and the main page (index-N.html and index.html) are rebuilt (the others remain unchanged). The page that appears when you click Older posts on the index page, index-N.html, might contain less than 10 posts if there are not enough posts to fill up all pages.

This can be disabled by setting INDEXES_STATIC to False. In that mode, index-1.html contains all the newest posts past the first 10 and will always contain 10 posts (unless you have less than 20). The last page, index-N.html, contains the oldest posts, and might contain less than 10 posts. This is how many blog engines and CMSes behave. Note that this will lead to rebuilding all index pages, which might be a problem for larger blogs (with a lot of index pages).

Post taxonomy

There are three taxonomy systems in Nikola, or three ways to organize posts. Those are:

  • tags
  • categories
  • sections

Tags and categories are visible on the Tags and Categories page, by default available at /categories/. Each tag/category/section has an index page and feeds.

Tags

Tags are the smallest and most basic of the taxonomy items. A post can have multiple tags, specified using the tags metadata entry (comma-separated). You should provide many tags to help your readers, and perhaps search engines, find content on your site.

Please note that tags are case-sensitive and that you cannot have two tags that differ only in case/punctuation (eg. using nikola in one post and Nikola in another will lead to a crash):

ERROR: Nikola: You have tags that are too similar: Nikola and nikola
ERROR: Nikola: Tag Nikola is used in: posts/second-post.rst
ERROR: Nikola: Tag nikola is used in: posts/1.rst

Nikola uses some tags to mark a post as “special” — those are draft, private, mathjax (for math support).

You can also generate a tag cloud with the tx3_tag_cloud plugin.

Categories

The next unit for organizing your content are categories. A post can have only one category, specified with the category meta tag. Those are deprecated and replaced by sections. They are displayed alongside tags. You can have categories and tags with the same name (categories’ RSS and HTML files are prefixed with cat_ by default).

Sections

Sections are the newest feature for taxonomy, and are not supported in themes by default. There are two ways to assign a section to a post:

  • through the directory structure (first directory is the section name, eg. /code/my-project/ is in the code category) — your POSTS should have those directories as the second element, eg.

    POSTS = (
        ('posts/code/*.rst', 'code', 'posts'),
    )
    
  • through the section meta field (requires POSTS_SECTION_FROM_META setting; recommended especially for existing sites which should not change the directory hierarchy)

Sections are meant to be used to organize different parts of your blog, parts that are about different topics. Unlike tags, which you should have tens (hundreds?) of, you should ideally have less than 10 sections (though it depends on what your blog needs; there is no hard limit).

With sections, you can also use some custom styling — if you install husl, you can use post.section_color() from within templates to get a distinct color for the section of a post, which you can then use in some inline CSS for the section name.

You can find some examples and more information in the original announcement

Configuring tags, categories and sections

There are multiple configuration variables dedicated to each of the three taxonomies. You can set:

  • TAG_PATH, TAGS_INDEX_PATH, CATEGORY_PATH, CATEGORY_PREFIX to configure paths used for tags and categories
  • POST_SECTION_NAME, POST_SECTION_TITLE`, `TAG_PAGES_TITLES, CATEGORY_PAGES_TITLES to set friendly section names and titles for index pages
  • POST_SECTION_DESCRIPTIONS, TAG_PAGES_DESCRIPTIONS`, CATEGORY_PAGES_DESCRIPTIONS to set descriptions for each of the items
  • POST_SECTION_COLORS to customize colors for each section
  • CATEGORY_ALLOW_HIERARCHIES and CATEGORY_OUTPUT_FLAT_HIERARCHIES to allow hierarchical categories
  • TAG_PAGES_ARE_INDEXES and CATEGORY_PAGES_ARE_INDEXES to display full-size indexes instead of simple post lists
  • WRITE_TAG_CLOUDS to enable/disable generating tag cloud files
  • HIDDEN_TAGS. HIDDEN_CATEGORIES to make some tags/categories invisible in lists
  • POSTS_SECTION_FROM_META to use .. section: in posts instead of inferring paths from paths

What if I don’t want a blog?

If you want a static site that does not have any blog-related elements, see our Creating a Site (Not a Blog) with Nikola guide.

Creating a Page

Pages are the same as posts, except that:

  • They are not added to the front page
  • They don't appear on the RSS feed
  • They use the story.tmpl template instead of post.tmpl by default

The default configuration expects the page's metadata and text files to be on the pages folder, but that can be changed (see PAGES option above).

You can create the page's files manually or use the new_post command with the -p option, which will place the files in the folder that has use_in_feed set to False.

In some places (including default directories and templates), pages are called stories for historic reasons. Both are synonyms for the same thing: pages that are not blog posts.

Supported input formats

Nikola supports multiple input formats. Out of the box, we have compilers available for:

  • reStructuredText (default and pre-configured)
  • Markdown
  • Jupyter/IPython Notebook
  • HTML
  • PHP
  • anything Pandoc supports (including Textile, DocBook, LaTeX, MediaWiki, TWiki, OPML, Emacs Org-Mode, txt2tags, Microsoft Word .docx, EPUB, Haddock markup)

Plus, we have specialized compilers in the Plugins Index for:

Configuring other input formats

In order to use input formats other than reStructuredText, you need some extra setup.

  1. Make sure you have the compiler for the input format you want. Some input formats are supported out-of-the-box, but others must be installed from the Plugins repository. You may also need some extra dependencies. You will get helpful errors if you try to build when missing something.
  2. You must ensure the compiler and your desired input file extension is included in the COMPILERS dict and does not conflict with any other format. This is extremely important for the pandoc compiler.
  3. Finally, you must configure the POSTS and PAGES tuples. Follow the instructions and the format set by pre-existing entries. Make sure to use the same extension as is set in COMPILERS and configure the outputs properly.

Markdown

To use Markdown in your posts/pages, make sure markdown is in your COMPILERS and that at least one of your desired extensions is defined in POSTS and PAGES.

You can use Python-Markdown extensions by setting the MARKDOWN_EXTENSIONS config option:

MARKDOWN_EXTENSIONS = ['fenced_code', 'codehilite', 'extra']

Nikola comes with some Markdown Extensions built-in and enabled by default, namely a gist directive, a podcast directive, and ~~strikethrough~~ support.

Jupyter/IPython Notebook

To use Jupyter Notebooks (previously known as IPython Notebooks) as posts/pages, make sure ipynb is in your COMPILERS and that the .ipynb extension is defined in POSTS and PAGES.

The -f argument to new_post should be used in the ipynb@KERNEL format. It defaults to Python in the version used by Nikola if not specified.

Jupyter Notebooks are also supported in stand-alone listings, if Jupyter support is enabled site-wide.

HTML

To use plain HTML in your posts/pages, make sure html is in your COMPILERS and that the .html extension is defined in POSTS and PAGES.

PHP

There are two ways of using PHP within Nikola:

  1. To use PHP in your posts/pages (inside your site, with the theme and everything), make sure php is in your COMPILERS and that the .php extension is defined in POSTS and PAGES.
  2. To use PHP as standalone files (without any modifications), put them in files/ (or whatever FILES_FOLDERS is configured to).

Pandoc

To use Pandoc, you must uncomment the entry in COMPILERS and set the extensions list to your desired extensions while also removing them from their original compilers. The input format is inferred from the extension by Pandoc.

Using Pandoc for reStructuredText, Markdown and other input formats that have a standalone Nikola plugin is not recommended as it disables plugins and extensions that are usually provided by Nikola.

Shortcodes

This feature is "inspired" (copied wholesale) from Hugo so I will steal part of their docs too.

A shortcode is a simple snippet inside a content file that Nikola will render using a predefined template or custom code from a plugin.

To use them from plugins, please see Extending Nikola

Using a shortcode

In your content files, a shortcode can be called by using this form:

{{% name parameters %}}

Shortcode parameters are space delimited. Parameters with spaces can be quoted (or backslash escaped).

The first word is always the name of the shortcode. Parameters follow the name. Depending upon how the shortcode is defined, the parameters may be named, positional or both. The format for named parameters models that of HTML with the format name="value".

Some shortcodes use or require closing shortcodes. Like HTML, the opening and closing shortcodes match (name only), the closing being prepended with a slash.

Example of a paired shortcode (note that we don't have a highlight shortcode yet ;-):

{{% highlight python %}} A bunch of code here {{% /highlight %}}

Note

Shortcodes and reStructuredText

In reStructuredText shortcodes may fail because docutils turns URL into links and everything breaks. For some shortcodes there are alternative docutils directives (example, you can use the media directive instead of the media shortcode.

Also, you can use the shortcode role:

:sc:`{{% shortcode here %}}`

That role passes text unaltered, so shortcodes behave correctly.

Built-in shortcodes

doc

Will link to a document in the page, see Doc directive for details. Example:

Take a look at {{% doc %}}my other post <creating-a-theme>{{% /doc %}} about theme creating.
post-list
Will show a list of posts, see the Post List directive for details
media

Display media embedded from a URL, for example, this will embed a youtube video:

{{% media url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nck6BZga7TQ" %}}
chart

Create charts via PyGal. This is similar to the chart directive except the syntax is adapted to shortcodes. This is an example:

{{% chart Bar title='Browser usage evolution (in %)' %}}
x_labels='["2002","2003","2004","2005","2006","2007","2008","2009","2010","2011","2012"]'%}}
'Firefox', [None, None, 0, 16.6, 25, 31]
'Chrome',  [None, None, None, None, None, None]
'IE',      [85.8, 84.6, 84.7, 74.5, 66, 58.6]
'Others',  [14.2, 15.4, 15.3, 8.9, 9, 10.4]
{{% /chart %}}
gist

Show GitHub gists. If you know the gist's ID, this will show it in your site:

{{% gist 2395294 %}}

raw
Passes the content along, mostly used so I can write this damn section and you can see the shortcodes instead of them being munged into shortcode output. I can't show an example because Inception.

Community shortcodes

Shortcodes created by the community are available in the shortcodes repository on GitHub.

Template-based shortcodes

If you put a template in shortcodes/ called mycode.tmpl then Nikola will create a shortcode called mycode you can use. Any options you pass to the shortcode will be available as variables for that template. Non-keyword options will be passed in a tuple variable named _args.

The post in which the shortcode is being used is available as the post variable, so you can access the title as post.title, and data loaded via the data field in the metadata using post.data(key).

If you use the shortcode as paired, then the contents between the paired tags will be available in the data variable. If you want to access the Nikola object, it will be available as site. Use with care :-)

See Extending Nikola for detailed information.

For example, if your shortcodes/foo.tmpl contains this:

This uses the bar variable: ${bar}

And your post contains this:

{{% foo bar=bla %}}

Then the output file will contain:

This uses the bar variable: bla

Finally, you can use a template shortcode without a file, by inserting the template in the shortcode itself:


{{% template %}}
% for foo in bar:
    <li> ${foo}
% endfor
{{% /template %}}

In that case, the template engine used will be your theme's and the arguments you pass, as well as the global context from your conf.py, are available to the template you are creating.

You can use anything defined in your confguration's GLOBAL_CONTEXT as variables in your shortcode template, with a caveat: Because of an unfortunate implementation detail (a name conflict), data is called global_data when used in a shortcode.

The Global Context and Data files

There is a GLOBAL_CONTEXT field in your conf.py where you can put things you want to make available to your templates.

It will also contain things you put in a data/ directory within your site. You can use JSON, YAML or TOML files (with the appropriate file extensions: json/js, yaml/yml, toml/tml) that decode to Python dictionaries. For example, if you create data/foo.json containing this:

{"bar": "baz"}

Then your templates can use things like ${data['foo']['bar']} and it will be replaced by "baz".

Individual posts can also have a data file. Those are specified using the data meta field (path relative to conf.py, can be different in different languages). Those are accessible as eg. ${post.meta('data')['bar'] in templates. Template-based shortcodes are a good idea in this case.

Data files can be useful for eg. auto-generated sites, where users provide JSON/YAML/TOML files and Nikola generates a large page with data from all data files. (This is especially useful with some automatic rebuild feature, like those documented in Deployment)

Data files are also available as global_data, to avoid name conflicts in shortcodes. (global_data works everywhere.)

Redirections

If you need a page to be available in more than one place, you can define redirections in your conf.py:

# A list of redirection tuples, [("foo/from.html", "/bar/to.html")].
#
# A HTML file will be created in output/foo/from.html that redirects
# to the "/bar/to.html" URL. notice that the "from" side MUST be a
# relative URL.
#
# If you don't need any of these, just set to []

REDIRECTIONS = [("index.html", "/weblog/index.html")]

It's better if you can do these using your web server's configuration, but if you can't, this will work.

Configuration

The configuration file is called conf.py and can be used to customize a lot of what Nikola does. Its syntax is python, but if you don't know the language, it still should not be terribly hard to grasp.

The default conf.py you get with Nikola should be fairly complete, and is quite commented.

You surely want to edit these options:

# Data about this site
BLOG_AUTHOR = "Your Name"  # (translatable)
BLOG_TITLE = "Demo Site"  # (translatable)
SITE_URL = "https://getnikola.com/"
BLOG_EMAIL = "[email protected]"
BLOG_DESCRIPTION = "This is a demo site for Nikola."  # (translatable)

Some options are marked with a (translatable) comment above or right next to them. For those options, two types of values can be provided:

  • a string, which will be used for all languages
  • a dict of language-value pairs, to have different values in each language

Note

It is possible to load the configuration from another file by specifying --conf=path/to/other.file on Nikola's command line. For example, to build your blog using the configuration file configurations/test.conf.py, you have to execute nikola build --conf=configurations/test.conf.py.

Customizing Your Site

There are lots of things you can do to personalize your website, but let's see the easy ones!

CSS tweaking

Using the default configuration, you can create a assets/css/custom.css file under files/ or in your theme and then it will be loaded from the <head> blocks of your site pages. Create it and put your CSS code there, for minimal disruption of the provided CSS files.

If you feel tempted to touch other files in assets, you probably will be better off with a custom theme.

If you want to use LESS or Sass for your custom CSS, or the theme you use contains LESS or Sass code that you want to override, you will need to install the LESS plugin or SASS plugin create a less or sass directory in your site root, put your .less or .scss files there and a targets file containing the list of files you want compiled.

Template tweaking and creating themes
If you really want to change the pages radically, you will want to do a custom theme.
Navigation Links

The NAVIGATION_LINKS option lets you define what links go in a sidebar or menu (depending on your theme) so you can link to important pages, or to other sites.

The format is a language-indexed dictionary, where each element is a tuple of tuples which are one of:

  1. A (url, text) tuple, describing a link
  2. A (((url, text), (url, text), (url, text)), title) tuple, describing a submenu / sublist.

Example:

NAVIGATION_LINKS = {
    DEFAULT_LANG: (
        ('/archive.html', 'Archives'),
        ('/categories/index.html', 'Tags'),
        ('/rss.xml', 'RSS'),
        ((('/foo', 'FOO'),
          ('/bar', 'BAR')), 'BAZ'),
    ),
}

Note

  1. Support for submenus is theme-dependent. Only one level of submenus is supported.
  2. Some themes, including the default Bootstrap 3 theme, may present issues if the menu is too large. (in bootstrap3, the navbar can grow too large and cover contents.)
  3. If you link to directories, make sure to follow STRIP_INDEXES. If it’s set to True, end your links with a /, otherwise end them with /index.html — or else they won’t be highlighted when active.

The SEARCH_FORM option contains the HTML code for a search form based on duckduckgo.com which should always work, but feel free to change it to something else.

Footer
CONTENT_FOOTER is displayed, small at the bottom of all pages, I use it for the copyright notice. The default shows a text formed using BLOG_AUTHOR, BLOG_EMAIL, the date and LICENSE. Note you need to use CONTENT_FOOTER_FORMATS instead of regular str.format or %-formatting, for compatibility with the translatable settings feature.
BODY_END
This option lets you define a HTML snippet that will be added at the bottom of body. The main usage is a Google analytics snippet or something similar, but you can really put anything there. Good place for JavaScript.
SOCIAL_BUTTONS_CODE
The SOCIAL_BUTTONS_CODE option lets you define a HTML snippet that will be added at the bottom of body. It defaults to a snippet for AddThis, but you can really put anything there. See social_buttons.html for more details.

Fancy Dates

Nikola can use various styles for presenting dates.

DATE_FORMAT
The date format to use if there is no JS or fancy dates are off. Compatible with Python’s strftime() syntax.
JS_DATE_FORMAT
The date format to use if fancy dates are on. Compatible with moment.js syntax.
DATE_FANCINESS = 0
Fancy dates are off, and DATE_FORMAT is used.
DATE_FANCINESS = 1
Dates are recalculated in user’s timezone. Requires JavaScript.
DATE_FANCINESS = 2
Dates are recalculated as relative time (eg. 2 days ago). Requires JavaScript.

In order to use fancy dates, your theme must support them. The built-in Bootstrap family supports it, but other themes might not by default.

For Mako:

<!-- required scripts -- best handled with bundles -->
<script src="/assets/js/moment-with-locales.min.js"></script>
<script src="/assets/js/fancydates.js"></script>

<!-- fancy dates code -->
<script>
moment.locale("${momentjs_locales[lang]}");
fancydates(${date_fanciness}, ${js_date_format});
</script>
<!-- end fancy dates code -->

For Jinja2:

<!-- required scripts -- best handled with bundles -->
<script src="/assets/js/moment-with-locales.min.js"></script>
<script src="/assets/js/fancydates.js"></script>

<!-- fancy dates code -->
<script>
moment.locale("{{ momentjs_locales[lang] }}");
fancydates({{ date_fanciness }}, {{ js_date_format }});
</script>
<!-- end fancy dates code -->

Adding Files

Any files you want to be in output/ but are not generated by Nikola (for example, favicon.ico) just put it in files/. Everything there is copied into output by the copy_files task. Remember that you can't have files that collide with files Nikola generates (it will give an error).

Important

Don't put any files manually in output/. Ever. Really. Maybe someday Nikola will just wipe output/ (when you run nikola check -f --clean-files) and then you will be sorry. So, please don't do that.

If you want to copy more than one folder of static files into output you can change the FILES_FOLDERS option:

# One or more folders containing files to be copied as-is into the output.
# The format is a dictionary of "source" "relative destination".
# Default is:
# FILES_FOLDERS = {'files': '' }
# Which means copy 'files' into 'output'

Custom Themes

If you prefer to have a custom appearance for your site, and modifying CSS files and settings (see Customizing Your Site for details) is not enough, you can create your own theme. See the Theming Nikola and Creating a Theme for more details. You can put them in a themes/ folder and set THEME to the directory name. You can also put them in directories listed in the EXTRA_THEMES_DIRS configuration variable.

Getting Extra Themes

There are a few themes for Nikola. They are available at the Themes Index. Nikola has a built-in theme download/install mechanism to install those themes — the theme command:

$ nikola theme -l
Themes:
-------
blogtxt
bootstrap3-gradients



$ nikola theme -i blogtxt
[2013-10-12T16:46:13Z] NOTICE: theme: Downloading:
https://themes.getnikola.com/v6/blogtxt.zip
[2013-10-12T16:46:15Z] NOTICE: theme: Extracting: blogtxt into themes

And there you are, you now have themes/blogtxt installed. It's very rudimentary, but it should work in most cases.

If you create a nice theme, please share it! You can do it as a pull request in the GitHub repository.

One other option is to tweak an existing theme using a different color scheme, typography and CSS in general. Nikola provides a bootswatch_theme option to create a custom theme by downloading free CSS files from http://bootswatch.com:

$ nikola bootswatch_theme -n custom_theme -s flatly -p bootstrap3
[2013-10-12T16:46:58Z] NOTICE: bootswatch_theme: Creating 'custom_theme' theme
from 'flatly' and 'bootstrap3'
[2013-10-12T16:46:58Z] NOTICE: bootswatch_theme: Downloading:
http://bootswatch.com//flatly/bootstrap.min.css
[2013-10-12T16:46:58Z] NOTICE: bootswatch_theme: Downloading:
http://bootswatch.com//flatly/bootstrap.css
[2013-10-12T16:46:59Z] NOTICE: bootswatch_theme: Theme created. Change the THEME setting to "custom_theme" to use it.

You can even try what different swatches do on an existing site using their handy bootswatchlet

Play with it, there's cool stuff there. This feature was suggested by clodo.

Deployment

If you can specify your deployment procedure as a series of commands, you can put them in the DEPLOY_COMMANDS option, and run them with nikola deploy.

You can have multiple deployment presets. If you run nikola deploy, the default preset is executed. You can also specify the names of presets you want to run (eg. nikola deploy default, multiple presets are allowed).

One caveat is that if any command has a % in it, you should double them.

Here is an example, from my own site's deployment script:

DEPLOY_COMMANDS = {'default': [
    'rsync -rav --delete output/ [email protected]:/srv/www/lateral',
    'rdiff-backup output ~/blog-backup',
    "links -dump 'http://www.twingly.com/ping2?url=lateral.netmanagers.com.ar'",
]}

Other interesting ideas are using git as a deployment mechanism (or any other VCS for that matter), using lftp mirror or unison, or Dropbox. Any way you can think of to copy files from one place to another is good enough.

Deploying to GitHub

Nikola provides a separate command github_deploy to deploy your site to GitHub Pages. The command builds the site, commits the output to a gh-pages branch and pushes the output to GitHub. Nikola uses the ghp-import command for this.

In order to use this feature, you need to configure a few things first. Make sure you have nikola and git installed on your PATH.

  1. Initialize a Nikola site, if you haven’t already.

  2. Initialize a git repository in your Nikola source directory by running:

    git init .
    git remote add origin [email protected]:user/repository.git
    
  3. Setup branches and remotes in conf.py:

    • GITHUB_DEPLOY_BRANCH is the branch where Nikola-generated HTML files will be deployed. It should be gh-pages for project pages and master for user pages (user.github.io).
    • GITHUB_SOURCE_BRANCH is the branch where your Nikola site source will be deployed. We recommend and default to src.
    • GITHUB_REMOTE_NAME is the remote to which changes are pushed.
    • GITHUB_COMMIT_SOURCE controls whether or not the source branch is automatically committed to and pushed. We recommend setting it to True, unless you are automating builds with Travis CI.
  4. Create a .gitignore file. We recommend adding at least the following entries:

    cache
    .doit.db
    __pycache__
    output
    
  5. If you set GITHUB_COMMIT_SOURCE to False, you must switch to your source branch and commit to it. Otherwise, this is done for you.

  6. Run nikola github_deploy. This will build the site, commit the output folder to your deploy branch, and push to GitHub. Your website should be up and running within a few minutes.

If you want to use a custom domain, create your CNAME file in files/CNAME on the source branch. Nikola will copy it to the output directory. To add a custom commit message, use the -m option, followed by your message.

Automated rebuilds with Travis CI

If you want automated rebuilds and GitHub Pages deployment, allowing you to blog from anywhere in the world, follow this guide: Automating Nikola rebuilds with Travis CI.

Automated rebuilds with GitLab

GitLab also offers rebuild automation if you want to use Nikola with GitLab Pages. Check out the example Nikola site on GitLab.

Comments and Annotations

While Nikola creates static sites, there is a minimum level of user interaction you are probably expecting: comments.

Nikola supports several third party comment systems:

By default it will use DISQUS, but you can change by setting COMMENT_SYSTEM to one of "disqus", "intensedebate", "livefyre", "moot", "googleplus", "facebook" or "isso"

To use comments in a visible site, you should register with the service and then set the COMMENT_SYSTEM_ID option.

I recommend 3rd party comments, and specially DISQUS because:

  1. It doesn't require any server-side software on your site
  2. They offer you a way to export your comments, so you can take them with you if you need to.
  3. It's free.
  4. It's damn nice.

You can disable comments for a post by adding a "nocomments" metadata field to it:

.. nocomments: True

DISQUS Support

In some cases, when you run the test site, you won't see the comments. That can be fixed by adding the disqus_developer flag to the templates but it's probably more trouble than it's worth.

Moot Support

Moot doesn't support comment counts on index pages, and it requires adding this to your conf.py:

BODY_END = """
<script src="//cdn.moot.it/1/moot.min.js"></script>
"""
EXTRA_HEAD_DATA = """
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="//cdn.moot.it/1/moot.css">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">
"""

Facebook Support

You need jQuery, but not because Facebook wants it (see Issue #639).

An alternative or complement to comments are annotations. Nikola integrates the annotation service provided by AnnotateIt. To use it, set the ANNOTATIONS option to True. This is specially useful if you want feedback on specific parts of your writing.

You can enable or disable annotations for specific posts or pages using the annotations and noannotations metadata.

Annotations require jQuery and are therefore not supported in the base theme. You can check bootstrap theme's base.html for details on how to handle them in custom themes.

Images and Galleries

To create an image gallery, all you have to do is add a folder inside galleries, and put images there. Nikola will take care of creating thumbnails, index page, etc.

If you click on images on a gallery, or on images with links in post, you will see a bigger image, thanks to the excellent colorbox. If don’t want this behavior, add an .islink class to your image or link. (The behavior is caused by <a class="image-reference"> if you need to use it outside of galleries and reST thumbnails.)

The gallery pages are generated using the gallery.tmpl template, and you can customize it there (you could switch to another lightbox instead of colorbox, change its settings, change the layout, etc.).

Images to be used in normal posts can be placed in the images folder. These images will be processed and have thumbnails created just as for galleries, but will then be copied directly to the corresponding path in the output directory, so you can reference it from whatever page you like, most easily using the thumbnail reST extension. If you don't want thumbnails, just use the files folder instead.

The conf.py options affecting images and gallery pages are these:

# One or more folders containing galleries. The format is a dictionary of
# {"source": "relative_destination"}, where galleries are looked for in
# "source/" and the results will be located in
# "OUTPUT_PATH/relative_destination/gallery_name"
# Default is:
GALLERY_FOLDERS = {"galleries": "galleries"}
# More gallery options:
THUMBNAIL_SIZE = 180
MAX_IMAGE_SIZE = 1280
USE_FILENAME_AS_TITLE = True
EXTRA_IMAGE_EXTENSIONS = []

# If set to False, it will sort by filename instead. Defaults to True
GALLERY_SORT_BY_DATE = True

# Folders containing images to be used in normal posts or pages.
# IMAGE_FOLDERS is a dictionary of the form {"source": "destination"},
# where "source" is the folder containing the images to be published, and
# "destination" is the folder under OUTPUT_PATH containing the images copied
# to the site. Thumbnail images will be created there as well.
IMAGE_FOLDERS = {'images': 'images'}

# Images will be scaled down according to IMAGE_THUMBNAIL_SIZE and MAX_IMAGE_SIZE
# options, but will have to be referenced manually to be visible on the site
# (the thumbnail has ``.thumbnail`` added before the file extension by default,
# but a different naming template can be configured with IMAGE_THUMBNAIL_FORMAT).
IMAGE_THUMBNAIL_SIZE = 400
IMAGE_THUMBNAIL_FORMAT = '{name}.thumbnail{ext}'

If you add a reST file in galleries/gallery_name/index.txt its contents will be converted to HTML and inserted above the images in the gallery page. The format is the same as for posts.

If you add some image filenames in galleries/gallery_name/exclude.meta, they will be excluded in the gallery page.

If USE_FILENAME_AS_TITLE is True the filename (parsed as a readable string) is used as the photo caption. If the filename starts with a number, it will be stripped. For example 03_an_amazing_sunrise.jpg will be render as An amazing sunrise.

Here is a demo gallery of historic, public domain Nikola Tesla pictures taken from this site.

Embedding Images

Assuming that you have your pictures stored in a folder called images (as configured above), you can embed the same in your posts with the following reST directive:

.. image:: /images/tesla.jpg

Which is equivalent to the following HTML code:

<img src="/images/tesla.jpg">

Please take note of the leading forward-slash / which refers to the root output directory. (Make sure to use this even if you’re not deploying to web server root.)

You can also use thumbnails with the .. thumbnail:: reST directive. For more details, and equivalent HTML code, see Thumbnails.

Handling EXIF Data

Your images contain a certain amount of extra data besides the image itself, called the EXIF metadata. It contains information about the camera you used to take the picture, when it was taken, and maybe even the location where it was taken.

This is both useful, because you can use it in some apps to locate all the pictures taken in a certain place, or with a certain camera, but also, since the pictures Nikola publishes are visible to anyone on the Internet, a privacy risk worth considering (Imagine if you post pictures taken at home with GPS info, you are publishing your home address!)

Nikola has some support for managing it, so let's go through a few scenarios to see which one you prefer.

Strip all EXIF data

Do this if you want to be absolutely sure that no sensitive information should ever leak:

PRESERVE_EXIF_DATA = False
EXIF_WHITELIST = {}

Preserve all EXIF data

Do this if you really don't mind people knowing where pictures were taken, or camera settings:

PRESERVE_EXIF_DATA = True
EXIF_WHITELIST = {'*': '*'}

Preserve some EXIF data

Do this if you really know what you are doing. EXIF data comes separated in a few IFD blocks. The most common ones are:

0th
Information about the image itself
Exif
Information about the camera and the image
1st
Information about embedded thumbnails (usually nothing)
thumbnail
An embedded thumbnail, in JPEG format (usually nothing)
GPS
Geolocation information about the image
Interop
Not too interesting at this point.

Each IFD in turn contains a number of tags. For example, 0th contains a ImageWidth tag. You can tell Nikola exactly which IFDs to keep, and within each IFD, which tags to keep, using the EXIF_WHITELIST option.

Let's see an example:

PRESERVE_EXIF_DATA = True
EXIF_WHITELIST = {
    "0th": ["Orientation", "ImageWidth", "ImageLength"],
    "Interop": "*",
}

So, we preserve EXIF data, and the whitelisted IFDs are "0th" and "Interop". That means GPS, for example, will be totally deleted.

Then, for the Interop IFD, we keep everything, and for the 0th IFD we only keep three tags, listed there.

There is a huge number of EXIF tags, described in the standard

Post Processing Filters

You can apply post processing to the files in your site, in order to optimize them or change them in arbitrary ways. For example, you may want to compress all CSS and JS files using yui-compressor.

To do that, you can use the provided helper adding this in your conf.py:

from nikola import filters

FILTERS = {
  ".css": [filters.yui_compressor],
  ".js": [filters.yui_compressor],
}

Where filters.yui_compressor is a helper function provided by Nikola. You can replace that with strings describing command lines, or arbitrary python functions.

If there's any specific thing you expect to be generally useful as a filter, contact me and I will add it to the filters library so that more people use it.

The currently available filters are:

html_tidy_nowrap
Prettify HTML 5 documents with tidy5
html_tidy_wrap
Prettify HTML 5 documents wrapped at 80 characters with tidy5
html_tidy_wrap_attr
Prettify HTML 5 documents and wrap lines and attributes with tidy5
html_tidy_mini
Minify HTML 5 into smaller documents with tidy5
html_tidy_withconfig
Run tidy5 with tidy5.conf as the config file (supplied by user)
html5lib_minify
Minify HTML5 using html5lib_minify
html5lib_xmllike
Format using html5lib
typogrify
Improve typography using typogrify
typogrify_sans_widont
Same as typogrify without the widont filter
minify_lines
THIS FILTER HAS BEEN TURNED INTO A NOOP and currently does nothing.
normalize_html
Pass HTML through LXML to normalize it. For example, it will resolve &quot; to actual quotes. Usually not needed.
yui_compressor
Compress CSS/JavaScript using YUI compressor
closure_compiler
Compile, compress, and optimize JavaScript Google Closure Compiler
optipng
Compress PNG files using optipng
jpegoptim
Compress JPEG files using jpegoptim
cssminify
Minify CSS using http://cssminifier.com/ (requires Internet access)
jsminify
Minify JS using http://javascript-minifier.com/ (requires Internet access)
jsonminify
Minify JSON files (strip whitespace and use minimal separators).
xmlminify
Minify XML files. Suitable for Nikola’s sitemaps and Atom feeds.

You can apply filters to specific posts or pages by using the filters metadata field:

.. filters: filters.html_tidy_nowrap, "sed s/foo/bar"

Optimizing Your Website

One of the main goals of Nikola is to make your site fast and light. So here are a few tips we have found when setting up Nikola with Apache. If you have more, or different ones, or about other web servers, please share!

  1. Use a speed testing tool. I used Yahoo's YSlow but you can use any of them, and it's probably a good idea to use more than one.

  2. Enable compression in Apache:

    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript
    
  3. If even after you did the previous step the CSS files are not sent compressed:

    AddType text/css .css
    
  4. Optionally you can create static compressed copies and save some CPU on your server with the GZIP_FILES option in Nikola.

  5. The webassets Nikola plugin can drastically decrease the number of CSS and JS files your site fetches.

  6. Through the filters feature, you can run your files through arbitrary commands, so that images are recompressed, JavaScript is minimized, etc.

  7. The USE_CDN option offloads standard JavaScript and CSS files to a CDN so they are not downloaded from your server.

Math

Nikola supports math input via MathJax (by default) or KaTeX. It is activated via the math roles and directives of reStructuredText and the usual LaTeX delimiters for other input formats.

Configuration

Nikola uses MathJax by default. If you want to use KaTeX (faster and prettier, but may not support every feature yet), set USE_KATEX = True in conf.py.

To use mathematics in a post, you must add the mathjax tag, no matter which renderer you are using. (Exception: posts that are Jupyter Notebooks are automatically marked as math)

By default, Nikola will accept \(...\) for inline math; \[...\] and $$...$$ for display math. If you want to use the old $...$ syntax as well (which may conflict with running text!), you need to use special config for your renderer:

MATHJAX_CONFIG = """
<script type="text/x-mathjax-config">
MathJax.Hub.Config({
    tex2jax: {
        inlineMath: [ ['$','$'], ["\\\(","\\\)"] ],
        displayMath: [ ['$$','$$'], ["\\\[","\\\]"] ],
        processEscapes: true
    },
    displayAlign: 'center', // Change this to 'left' if you want left-aligned equations.
    "HTML-CSS": {
        styles: {'.MathJax_Display': {"margin": 0}}
    }
});
</script>
"""

KATEX_AUTO_RENDER = """
delimiters: [
    {left: "$$", right: "$$", display: true},
    {left: "\\\[", right: "\\\]", display: true},
    {left: "$", right: "$", display: false},
    {left: "\\\(", right: "\\\)", display: false}
]
"""

Inline usage

Inline mathematics are produced using the reST math role or the LaTeX backslash-parentheses delimiters:

Euler’s formula: \(e^{ix} = \cos x + i\sin x\)

In reST:

Euler’s formula: :math:`e^{ix} = \cos x + i\sin x`

In HTML and other input formats:

Euler’s formula: \(e^{ix} = \cos x + i\sin x\)

Note that some input formats (including Markdown) require using double backslashes in the delimiters (\\(inline math\\)). Please check your output first before reporting bugs.

Display usage

Display mathematics are produced using the reST math directive or the LaTeX backslash-brackets delimiters:

\begin{equation*} \int \frac{dx}{1+ax}=\frac{1}{a}\ln(1+ax)+C \end{equation*}

In reST:

.. math::

   \int \frac{dx}{1+ax}=\frac{1}{a}\ln(1+ax)+C

In HTML and other input formats:

\[\int \frac{dx}{1+ax}=\frac{1}{a}\ln(1+ax)+C\]

Note that some input formats (including Markdown) require using double backslashes in the delimiters (\\[display math\\]). Please check your output first before reporting bugs.

reStructuredText Extensions

Nikola includes support for a few directives and roles that are not part of docutils, but which we think are handy for website development.

Includes

Nikola supports the standard reStructuredText include directive, but with a catch: filenames are relative to Nikola site root (directory with conf.py) instead of the post location (eg. posts/ directory)!

Media

This directive lets you embed media from a variety of sites automatically by just passing the URL of the page. For example here are two random videos:

.. media:: http://vimeo.com/72425090

.. media:: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyRpAat5oz0

It supports Instagram, Flickr, Github gists, Funny or Die, and dozens more, thanks to Micawber

YouTube

To link to a YouTube video, you need the id of the video. For example, if the URL of the video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N_tupPBtWQ what you need is 8N_tupPBtWQ

Once you have that, all you need to do is:

.. youtube:: 8N_tupPBtWQ

Supported options: height, width, align (one of left, center, right) — all are optional. Example:

.. youtube:: 8N_tupPBtWQ
   :align: center

Vimeo

To link to a Vimeo video, you need the id of the video. For example, if the URL of the video is http://www.vimeo.com/20241459 then the id is 20241459

Once you have that, all you need to do is:

.. vimeo:: 20241459

If you have internet connectivity when generating your site, the height and width of the embedded player will be set to the native height and width of the video. You can override this if you wish:

.. vimeo:: 20241459
   :height: 240
   :width: 320

Supported options: height, width, align (one of left, center, right) — all are optional.

Soundcloud

This directive lets you share music from http://soundcloud.com You first need to get the ID for the piece, which you can find in the "share" link. For example, if the WordPress code starts like this:

[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/78131362" …/]

The ID is 78131362 and you can embed the audio with this:

.. soundcloud:: 78131362

You can also embed playlists, via the soundcloud_playlist directive which works the same way.

Supported options: height, width, align (one of left, center, right) — all are optional.

Code

The code directive has been included in docutils since version 0.9 and now replaces Nikola's code-block directive. To ease the transition, two aliases for code directive are provided: code-block and sourcecode:

.. code-block:: python
   :number-lines:

   print("Our virtues and our failings are inseparable")

Listing

To use this, you have to put your source code files inside listings or whatever folders your LISTINGS_FOLDERS variable is set to fetch files from. Assuming you have a foo.py inside one of these folders:

.. listing:: foo.py python

Will include the source code from foo.py, highlight its syntax in python mode, and also create a listings/foo.py.html page (or in another directory, depending on LISTINGS_FOLDER) and the listing will have a title linking to it.

The stand-alone listings/ pages also support Jupyter notebooks, if they are supported site-wide.

Listings support the same options reST includes support (including various options for controlling which parts of the file are included), and also a linenos option for Sphinx compatibility.

The LISTINGS_FOLDER configuration variable allows to specify a list of folders where to fetch listings from together with subfolder of the output folder where the processed listings should be put in. The default is, LISTINGS_FOLDERS = {'listings': 'listings'}, which means that all source code files in listings will be taken and stored in output/listings. Extending LISTINGS_FOLDERS to {'listings': 'listings', 'code': 'formatted-code'} will additionally process all source code files in code and put the results into output/formatted-code.

Note

Formerly, start-at and end-at options were supported; however, they do not work anymore (since v6.1.0) and you should now use start-after and end-before, respectively. You can also use start-line and end-line.

Gist

You can easily embed GitHub gists with this directive, like this:

.. gist:: 2395294

Producing this:

This degrades gracefully if the browser doesn't support JavaScript.

Thumbnails

To include an image placed in the images folder (or other folders defined in IMAGE_FOLDERS), use the thumbnail directive, like this:

.. thumbnail:: /images/tesla.jpg

The small thumbnail will be placed in the page, and it will be linked to the bigger version of the image when clicked, using colorbox by default. All options supported by the reST image directive are supported (except target). If a body element is provided, the thumbnail will mimic the behavior of the figure directive instead:

.. thumbnail:: /images/tesla.jpg

   Nikola Tesla, the man that invented the 20th century.

If you want to include a thumbnail in a non-reST post, you need to produce at least this basic HTML:

<a class="image-reference" href="images/tesla.jpg"><img src="images/tesla.thumbnail.jpg"></a>

Slideshows

To create an image slideshow, you can use the slides directive. For example:

.. slides::

   /galleries/demo/tesla_conducts_lg.jpg
   /galleries/demo/tesla_lightning2_lg.jpg
   /galleries/demo/tesla4_lg.jpg
   /galleries/demo/tesla_lightning1_lg.jpg
   /galleries/demo/tesla_tower1_lg.jpg

Chart

This directive is a thin wrapper around Pygal and will produce charts as SVG files embedded directly in your pages.

Here's an example of how it works:

.. chart:: Bar
   :title: 'Browser usage evolution (in %)'
   :x_labels: ["2002", "2003", "2004", "2005", "2006", "2007"]

   'Firefox', [None, None, 0, 16.6, 25, 31]
   'Chrome',  [None, None, None, None, None, None]
   'IE',      [85.8, 84.6, 84.7, 74.5, 66, 58.6]
   'Others',  [14.2, 15.4, 15.3, 8.9, 9, 10.4]

The argument passed next to the directive (Bar in that example) is the type of chart, and can be one of Line, StackedLine, Bar, StackedBar, HorizontalBar, XY, DateY, Pie, Radar, Dot, Funnel, Gauge, Pyramid. For examples of what each kind of graph is, check here

It can take a lot of options to let you customize the charts (in the example, title and x_labels). You can use any option described in the pygal docs

Finally, the content of the directive is the actual data, in the form of a label and a list of values, one series per line.

Doc

This role is useful to make links to other post or page inside the same site.

Here's an example:

Take a look at :doc:`my other post <creating-a-theme>` about theme creating.

In this case we are giving the portion of text we want to link. So, the result will be:

Take a look at my other post about theme creating.

If we want to use the post's title as the link's text, just do:

Take a look at :doc:`creating-a-theme` to know how to do it.

and it will produce:

Take a look at Creating a Theme to know how to do it.

Post List

Warning

Any post or page that uses this directive will be considered out of date, every time a post is added or deleted, causing maybe unnecessary rebuilds.

On the other hand, it will sometimes not be considered out of date if a post content changes, so it can sometimes be shown outdated, in those cases, use nikola build -a to force a total rebuild.

This directive can be used to generate a list of posts. You could use it, for example, to make a list of the latest 5 blog posts, or a list of all blog posts with the tag nikola:

Here are my 5 latest and greatest blog posts:

.. post-list::
   :stop: 5

These are all my posts about Nikola:

.. post-list::
   :tags: nikola

Using shortcode syntax (for other compilers):

{{% post-list stop=5 %}}{{% /post-list %}}

The following options are recognized:

  • start : integer
    The index of the first post to show. A negative value like -3 will show the last three posts in the post-list. Defaults to None.
  • stop : integer
    The index of the last post to show. A value negative value like -1 will show every post, but not the last in the post-list. Defaults to None.
  • reverse : flag
    Reverse the order of the post-list. Defaults is to not reverse the order of posts.
  • sort: string
    Sort post list by one of each post's attributes, usually title or a custom priority. Defaults to None (chronological sorting).
  • date: string
    Show posts that match date range specified by this option. Format:
    • comma-separated clauses (AND)
    • clause: attribute comparison_operator value (spaces optional)
      • attribute: year, month, day, hour, month, second, weekday, isoweekday; or empty for full datetime
      • comparison_operator: == != <= >= < >
      • value: integer, 'now' or dateutil-compatible date input
  • tags : string [, string...]
    Filter posts to show only posts having at least one of the tags. Defaults to None.
  • require_all_tags : flag
    Change tag filter behaviour to show only posts that have all specified tags. Defaults to False.
  • categories : string [, string...]
    Filter posts to show only posts having one of the categories. Defaults to None.
  • sections : string [, string...]
    Filter posts to show only posts having one of the sections. Defaults to None.
  • slugs : string [, string...]
    Filter posts to show only posts having at least one of the slugs. Defaults to None.
  • post_type (or type) : string
    Show only posts, pages or all. Replaces all. Defaults to posts.
  • all : flag
    (deprecated, use post_type instead) Shows all posts and pages in the post list. Defaults to show only posts.
  • lang : string
    The language of post titles and links. Defaults to default language.
  • template : string
    The name of an alternative template to render the post-list. Defaults to post_list_directive.tmpl
  • id : string
    A manual id for the post list. Defaults to a random name composed by 'post_list_' + uuid.uuid4().hex.

The post list directive uses the post_list_directive.tmpl template file (or another one, if you use the template option) to generate the list's HTML. By default, this is an unordered list with dates and clickable post titles. See the template file in Nikola's base theme for an example of how this works.

The list may fail to update in some cases, please run nikola build -a with the appropriate path if this happens.

We recommend using pages with dates in the past (1970-01-01) to avoid dependency issues.

If you are using this as a shortcode, flags (reverse, all) are meant to be used with a True argument, eg. all=True.

Importing your WordPress site into Nikola

If you like Nikola, and want to start using it, but you have a WordPress blog, Nikola supports importing it. Here are the steps to do it:

  1. Get an XML dump of your site [1]
  2. nikola import_wordpress mysite.wordpress.2012-12-20.xml

After some time, this will create a new_site folder with all your data. It currently supports the following:

  • All your posts and pages

  • Keeps “draft” status

  • Your tags and categories

  • Imports your attachments and fixes links to point to the right places

  • Will try to add redirects that send the old post URLs to the new ones

  • Will give you a URL map so you know where each old post was

    This is also useful for DISQUS thread migration, or server-based 301 redirects!

  • Allows you to export your comments with each post

  • Exports information on attachments per post

  • There are different methods to transfer the content of your posts:

    • You can convert them to HTML with the WordPress page compiler plugin for Nikola. This will format the posts including supported shortcodes the same way as WordPress does. Use the --transform-to-html option to convert your posts to HTML.

      If you use this option, you do not need to install the plugin permanently. You can ask Nikola to install the plugin into the subdirectory plugins of the current working directory by specifying the --install-wordpress-compiler option.

    • You can leave the posts the way they are and use the WordPress page compiler plugin to render them when building your new blog. This also allows you to create new posts using the WordPress syntax, or to manually add more shortcode plugins later. Use the --use-wordpress-compiler option to not touch your posts.

      If you want to use this option, you have to install the plugin permanently. You can ask Nikola to install the plugin into your new site by specifying the --install-wordpress-compiler option.

    • You can let Nikola convert your posts to Markdown. This is not error free, because WordPress uses some unholy mix of HTML and strange things. This is the default option and requires no plugins.

    You will find your old posts in new_site/posts/post-title.html in the first case, new_site/posts/post-title.wp in the second case or new_site/posts/post-title.md in the last case if you need to edit or fix any of them.

    Please note that the page compiler currently only supports the [code] shortcode, but other shortcodes can be supported via plugins.

    Also note that the WordPress page compiler is licensed under GPL v2 since it uses code from WordPress itself, while Nikola is licensed under the more liberal MIT license.

This feature is a work in progress, and the only way to improve it is to have it used for as many sites as possible and make it work better each time, so we are happy to get requests about it.

[1]

The dump needs to be in 1.2 format. You can check by reading it, it should say xmlns:excerpt="http://wordpress.org/export/1.2/excerpt/" near the top of the file. If it says 1.1 instead of 1.2 you will have to update your WordPress before dumping.

Other versions may or may not work.

Importing to a custom location or into an existing site

It is possible to either import into a location you desire or into an already existing Nikola site. To do so you can specify a location after the dump:

$ nikola import_wordpress mysite.wordpress.2012-12-20.xml -o import_location

With this command Nikola will import into the folder import_location.

If the folder already exists Nikola will not overwrite an existing conf.py. Instead a new file with a timestamp at the end of the filename will be created.

Using Twitter Cards

Nikola supports Twitter Card summaries, but they are disabled by default.

Twitter Cards enable you to show additional information in Tweets that link to your content. Nikola supports Twitter Cards. They are implemented to use Open Graph tags whenever possible.

Important

To use Twitter Cards you need to opt-in on Twitter. To do so, please visit https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

Images displayed come from the previewimage meta tag.

You can specify the card type by using the card parameter in TWITTER_CARD.

To enable and configure your use of Twitter Cards, please modify the corresponding lines in your conf.py:

TWITTER_CARD = {
    'use_twitter_cards': True,  # enable Twitter Cards
    'card': 'summary',          # Card type, you can also use 'summary_large_image',
                                # see https://dev.twitter.com/cards/types
    'site': '@website',         # twitter nick for the website
    'creator': '@username',     # Username for the content creator / author.
}

Custom Plugins

You can create your own plugins (see Extending Nikola) and use them in your own site by putting them in a plugins/ folder. You can also put them in directories listed in the EXTRA_PLUGINS_DIRS configuration variable.

Getting Extra Plugins

If you want extra plugins, there is also the Plugins Index.

Similarly to themes, there is a nice, built-in command to manage them — plugin:

$ nikola plugin -l
Plugins:
--------
helloworld
tags



$ nikola plugin --install helloworld
[2013-10-12T16:51:56Z] NOTICE: install_plugin: Downloading: https://plugins.getnikola.com/v6/helloworld.zip
[2013-10-12T16:51:58Z] NOTICE: install_plugin: Extracting: helloworld into plugins
plugins/helloworld/requirements.txt
[2013-10-12T16:51:58Z] NOTICE: install_plugin: This plugin has Python dependencies.
[2013-10-12T16:51:58Z] NOTICE: install_plugin: Installing dependencies with pip...


[2013-10-12T16:51:59Z] NOTICE: install_plugin: Dependency installation succeeded.
[2013-10-12T16:51:59Z] NOTICE: install_plugin: This plugin has a sample config file.
Contents of the conf.py.sample file:

    # Should the Hello World plugin say “BYE” instead?
    BYE_WORLD = False

Then you also can uninstall your plugins:

$ nikola plugin --uninstall tags
[2014-04-15T08:59:24Z] WARNING: plugin: About to uninstall plugin: tags
[2014-04-15T08:59:24Z] WARNING: plugin: This will delete /home/ralsina/foo/plugins/tags
Are you sure? [y/n] y
[2014-04-15T08:59:26Z] WARNING: plugin: Removing /home/ralsina/foo/plugins/tags

And upgrade them:

$ nikola plugin --upgrade
[2014-04-15T09:00:18Z] WARNING: plugin: This is not very smart, it just reinstalls some plugins and hopes for the best
Will upgrade 1 plugins: graphviz
Upgrading graphviz
[2014-04-15T09:00:20Z] INFO: plugin: Downloading: https://plugins.getnikola.com/v7/graphviz.zip
[2014-04-15T09:00:20Z] INFO: plugin: Extracting: graphviz into /home/ralsina/.nikola/plugins/
[2014-04-15T09:00:20Z] NOTICE: plugin: This plugin has third-party dependencies you need to install manually.
Contents of the requirements-nonpy.txt file:

    Graphviz
        http://www.graphviz.org/

You have to install those yourself or through a package manager.

You can also share plugins you created with the community! Visit the GitHub repository to find out more.

You can use the plugins in this repository without installing them into your site, by cloning the repository and adding the path of the plugins directory to the EXTRA_PLUGINS_DIRS list in your configuration.

Advanced Features

Debugging

For pdb debugging in Nikola, you should use doit.tools.set_trace() instead of the usual pdb call. By default, doit (and thus Nikola) redirects stdout and stderr. Thus, you must use the different call. (Alternatively, you could run with nikola build -v 2, which disables the redirections.)

Shell Tab Completion

Since Nikola is a command line tool, and this is the 21st century, it's handy to have smart tab-completion so that you don't have to type the full commands.

To enable this, you can use the nikola tabcompletion command like this, depending on your shell:

$ nikola tabcompletion --shell bash --hardcode-tasks > _nikola_bash
$ nikola tabcompletion --shell zsh --hardcode-tasks > _nikola_zsh

The --hardcode-tasks adds tasks to the completion and may need updating periodically.

Please refer to your shell’s documentation for help on how to use those files.

License

Nikola is released under the MIT license, which is a free software license. Some components shipped along with Nikola, or required by it are released under other licenses.

If you are not familiar with free software licensing, here is a brief explanation (this is NOT legal advice): In general, you can do pretty much anything you want — including modifying Nikola, using and redistributing the original version or the your modified version. However, if you redistribute Nikola to someone else, either a modified version or the original version, the full copyright notice and license text must be included in your distribution. Nikola is provided “as is”, and the Nikola contributors are not liable for any damage caused by the software. Read the full license text for details.