What's the difference between 'pelican ./content' and 'make html'?

Question

I start studying Pelican today because I want to move my blog from wordpress to pelican.

However, after reading the docs, I still don't know the difference between pelican ./content and make html. They both seem to generate a static website. Besides, pelican ./content always returns a UnicodeDecodeError** for me, whilepelican ./content` does not.

What's the difference between them and why?

Answer 1

In the folder where you use $ pelican-quickstart, you will find a file named Makefile.

You will find a line like this html: clean $(OUTPUTDIR)/index.html, and $(OUTPUTDIR)/%.html: $(PELICAN) $(INPUTDIR) -o $(OUTPUTDIR) -s $(CONFFILE) $(PELICANOPTS).

This file show you what pelican have done when you type make ***, and you can config many other things in this file.

Answer 2

pelican ./content runs the generation of the website using defaults and trying to guess the location of your content, output and configuration files.

make html calls pelican, but explicitly gives it the input directory, the output directory, the configuration file and, optionally, some extra options.

Basically, make html (along with make regenerate) are convenience methods that make the job a bit easier for you. In any case, you should run make publish to generate the content that is to be uploaded to your web server, as it loads the publishconf.py files, which define a few extra options (the rss feeds) and allows you to change settings for the "proper" website.