.. Fladi.at post example, created by `ablog start` on Aug 05, 2025.

.. post:: Jan 05, 2026
   :tags: News, Python
   :author: Michael Fladischer

A new blogging engine
=====================

For quite a while (especially since I became a dad) my blog was inactive. The old one was based on `ikiwiki <https://ikiwiki.info/>`__ and it lacked a clean
deployment workflow.

For several months I was looking for a suitable replacement which would satisfy my requirements:

 * Compiles Markdown or ReStructuredText to static HTML
 * The whole source-code of the site can be stored in git, no database required
 * Supports a simple build, preferably a single CLI command to build the whole site
 * Extendable with plugins (if built-in features are lacking things like a gallery)
 * Written in Python because most of my work (payed and unpaid) is done in this language
 * Packages for Debian so I can easily deploy it on my infrastructure

Several candidates would fit those requirements:

 * `Pelican`_
 * `MkDocs`_
 * `Nikola`_
 * `Lektor`_
 * `Sphinx`_

In the end I decided to opt for `Sphinx`_ as it provided a good blogging solution in the form of `ABlog`_.
Getting started on Debian is as easy as installing it:

.. code-block:: zsh

   sudo apt install python3-sphinx-ablog

Afterwards start a new project, creating a basic Sphinx structure:

.. code-block:: zsh

   ablog start

The deployment is done by pushing to a Git repository with a custom post-update hook which builds the whole project using sphinx. It then places the files in
the webserver document root directory. I will describe this hook script here in a future post.

.. _Pelican: https://getpelican.com/
.. _MkDocs: https://www.mkdocs.org/
.. _Nikola: https://getnikola.com/
.. _Pelican: https://getpelican.com/
.. _Lektor: https://www.getlektor.com/
.. _Sphinx: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/
.. _ABlog: https://ablog.readthedocs.io/