This weekend I moved my blog over to Pelican from Octopress. I’ve been very happy with this decision.

But I decided I wanted to go a step further, and set up autopublish. I knew it could be easily done with a git hook, but I wanted to be able to easily blog from my iOS devices as well, so I decided to go with Dropbox instead.

Getting Dropbox

First, I needed to install Dropbox on my machine. Dropbox provides an easy one-liner:

cd ~ && wget -O - "https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86_64" | tar xzf -

Now, when I first tried to start up dropbox, it gave me a cryptic error, which I traced back to not having X11 libraries installed. Turns out I just needed to unset my DISPLAY variable:

unset DISPLAY

Now Dropbox will start properly:

~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd

Follow the instructions to get Dropbox authorized on your server, then once you see the success message, exit using ctrl-c.

Configure Dropbox as System Service

Next we need to create an init script for Dropbox. I found an example here. Here’s the Ubuntu/Debian script:

#!/bin/sh
#dropbox service
DROPBOX_USERS="user1 user2"

DAEMON=.dropbox-dist/dropboxd

start() {
   echo "Starting dropbox..."
   for dbuser in $DROPBOX_USERS; do
       HOMEDIR=`getent passwd $dbuser | cut -d: -f6`
       if [ -x $HOMEDIR/$DAEMON ]; then
           HOME="$HOMEDIR" start-stop-daemon -b -o -c $dbuser -S -u $dbuser -x $HOMEDIR/$DAEMON
       fi
   done
}

stop() {
   echo "Stopping dropbox..."
   for dbuser in $DROPBOX_USERS; do
       HOMEDIR=`getent passwd $dbuser | cut -d: -f6`
       if [ -x $HOMEDIR/$DAEMON ]; then
           start-stop-daemon -o -c $dbuser -K -u $dbuser -x $HOMEDIR/$DAEMON
       fi
   done
}

status() {
   for dbuser in $DROPBOX_USERS; do
       dbpid=`pgrep -u $dbuser dropbox`
       if [ -z $dbpid ] ; then
           echo "dropboxd for USER $dbuser: not running."
       else
           echo "dropboxd for USER $dbuser: running (pid $dbpid)"
       fi
   done
}

case "$1" in

   start)
       start
       ;;
   stop)
       stop
       ;;
   restart|reload|force-reload)
       stop
       start
       ;;
   status)
       status
       ;;
   *)
       echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/dropbox {start|stop|reload|force-reload|restart|status}"
       exit 1

esac

exit 0

Note that when I pulled down that script originally, it had a typo. The DAEMON line near the top of the file should be .dropbox-dist/dropboxd – they left off the trailing d in the version I downloaded.

Place this script in /etc/init.d/dropbox. Replace the DROPBOX_USERS setting with a space-separate list of users for which you want Dropbox running. Then, make the file executable and set it to execute on startup:

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/dropbox
sudo update-rc.d dropbox defaults

Now, start Dropbox again, as a service:

sudo service dropbox start

Selective Sync (Optional)

I have a very large Dropbox folder, and so only want to sync the Blogs folder from my Dropbox account.

I downloaded the CLI script mentioned on that installation page:

wget https://linux.dropbox.com/packages/dropbox.py

Then, with Dropbox running, I excluded all the directories within the Dropbox folder, then removed the Blogs folder from the resulting exclusion list:

./dropbox.py exclude add ~/Dropbox/*
./dropbox.py exclude remove ~/Dropbox/blogs

Perfect, now I have only my blogs syncing to my server’s dropbox folder.

Autopublish: The Watcher Script

The automagic regeneration of my blog I modified from this post.

I’m going to assume you have a working Pelican setup. Assuming you used the Pelican quickstart, you should have both a pelicanconf.py and a publishconf.py. The publishconf.py is going to be what we use.

First, you must modify your publishconf.py file such that it can operate from any directory, rather than relying on relative paths. Thus, you should add your blog’s absolute directory to the Python path inside of that script. Here is my publishconf.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- #
from __future__ import unicode_literals

# This file is only used if you use `make publish` or
# explicitly specify it as your config file.

import os
import sys

#sys.path.append(os.curdir)
# This is the directory where your pelican's
# configuration files reside
pelicanpath = '/home/basepi/Dropbox/Blogs/blog.basepi.net'
sys.path.append(pelicanpath)

sys.path.append(os.curdir)
from pelicanconf import *

SITEURL = 'http://blog.basepi.net'
RELATIVE_URLS = False

FEED_ALL_ATOM = None
CATEGORY_FEED_ATOM = None

DELETE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY = True

These are the key lines:

pelicanpath = '/home/basepi/Dropbox/Blogs/blog.basepi.net'
sys.path.append(pelicanpath)

Now no matter what my current working directory is, the publishconf.py will be able to find the files it needs to operate.

Next, I created a publish script, publish.sh:

#!/bin/bash

PELICAN=/usr/bin/pelican
CONTENT=/home/basepi/Dropbox/Blogs/blog.basepi.net/content
OUTPUT=/home/basepi/Dropbox/Blogs/blog.basepi.net/output
SETTINGS=/home/basepi/Dropbox/Blogs/blog.basepi.net/publishconf.py

rm -rf /home/basepi/Dropbox/Blogs/blog.basepi.net/output/*
$PELICAN $CONTENT -o $OUTPUT -s $SETTINGS || exit $?
rsync -r --delete /home/basepi/Dropbox/Blogs/blog.basepi.net/output/ /var/www/blog.basepi.net

Note the use of || exit $?. This will cause the script to exit if the retcode of the pelican command is non-zero. I don’t want to publish my blog if there are problems.

Make this script executable, and then run it to test that things are working.

The final step is to set up the watcher script which will run our publish script on changes. For this purpose we will be using this watcher script.

This script, conveniently, is ready to be used as an init script. Take the script and put it at /etc/init.d/watcher. Make it executable:

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/watcher

Now, we need to create the configuration file for the watcher. This file is at /etc/watcher.ini:

[DEFAULT]

; where to store output
logfile=/var/log/watcher.log

; where to save the PID file
pidfile=/var/run/watcher.pid

[job1]
watch=/home/basepi/Dropbox/Blogs/blog.basepi.net/content
events=modify,create,delete,move
excluded=
recursive=true
autoadd=true
command=/home/basepi/Dropbox/Blogs/blog.basepi.net/publish.sh

Now we just need to start the watcher:

sudo service watcher start

You can tail the log to see if it’s working (change a file to trigger it):

tail -f /var/log/watcher.log

If everything is in order, just have the watcher start on boot:

sudo update-rc.d watcher defaults

And you’re done! Now, any time you change the content of your blog, it will be automatically re-built and published for you!

Let me know what you think in the comments. Or hit me up on Twitter!

Getting Dropbox#

Configure Dropbox as System Service#

Selective Sync (Optional)#

Autopublish: The Watcher Script#

Getting Dropbox

Configure Dropbox as System Service

Selective Sync (Optional)

Autopublish: The Watcher Script