Batch Files are your friend

Something that my pelican experience was missing was a little automation that my Unix friends enjoy with makerfiles. I'm sure that there is a windows workaround, or I could just continue to work in WSL for my pelican life.

I do enjoy working in WSL and all the Linux life that brings, but it was starting to become a pain, and I never could figure out how to get lftp working the way that I wanted.

I bought Filezilla Pro CLI

Rather than burning a bunch more hours trying to figure out lftp, or the various built-in ftp clients, I srung for Filezilla Pro. I have used the free version of Filezilla for as long as I can remember, probably since it was a thing on windows, so spending a bit of money to solve the inconvenience I have now and have the functionality to connet to various cloud platforms was a no brainer.

Something that the CLI version has is the ability to do some scripting, so in the batchfile I call the script to update the site on the remote server.

I don't have to include any sensitive information in the script because it shares the site manager with the GUI version.

The scripts

To make everything work cleanly I need two script files, and to manually pipenv shell into the environment.

The Batch File

To start the batchfile looks like this:

@echo off
cd jeffmackinnon.com-Sourcecode
pelican content -o C:\projects\_publish\jeffmackinnon.com -s publishconf.py
pelican content -o \\bilbo\web -s publishbilbo.py

rem When everything is made it is time to sync with the interwebs. This takes another script for now.

"C:\Program Files\FileZilla Pro CLI\fzcli.exe" --mode standalone --script C:\projects\pelican\cliuploadjeff.txt

cd c:\projects\pelican

This batchfile requires me to be in the proper pipenv, but then it just runs, the reason there is two is because I'm strange. I have have my online version and a local NAS version that I typically use for testing things, and yes all my servers are LOTR based.

This batch file does the following:

Changes the directory to where the site source is located
Create the html files for the public site
Create the html files for the local copy
Call the filezilla script to sync the remote site
Change the directory back to the main projects file.

The Filezilla Script

To make things "clean" the Filezilla CLI script looks like this:

site 0/jeffsite
lcd c:/projects/_publish/jeffmackinnon.com
sync -d b -e n C:/projects/_publish/jeffmackinnon.com/ /
sync -d b -e n -r C:/projects/_publish/jeffmackinnon.com/author/ /author/
sync -d b -e n -r C:/projects/_publish/jeffmackinnon.com/category /category/
sync -d b -e n -r C:/projects/_publish/jeffmackinnon.com/feeds/ /feeds/
sync -d b -e n -r C:/projects/_publish/jeffmackinnon.com/images/ /images/
sync -d b -e n -r C:/projects/_publish/jeffmackinnon.com/pages/ /pages/
sync -d b -e n -r C:/projects/_publish/jeffmackinnon.com/photos/ /photos/
sync -d b -e n -r C:/projects/_publish/jeffmackinnon.com/tag/ /tag/
sync -d b -e n -r C:/projects/_publish/jeffmackinnon.com/theme/ /theme/
sync -d b -e n -r C:/projects/_publish/jeffmackinnon.com/videos/ /videos/
exit

If I only had the pelican based site on this server, I could simply use sync -d b -e n C:/projects/_publish/jeffmackinnon.com/ /, but since I have a lot of different sub-directories, etc, I needed to make it a bit longer.

So to go through everything that this does:

The first line connects to the bookmarked Filezilla jeffsite
lcd changes the local directory to where the files to be published is located.
The first sync line non-recursively syncs the root folder.
The remaining sync lines recursively syncs the pelican created folders
And finally I disconnect and exit from Filezilla CLI (fzcli).

Closing

I have only used this a couple times and haven't run into any issues. Some of the things that I would like to add to these scripts are logfiles and include some error catching.

I also want to figure out how to call a pipenv shell within a batch file and then continue, or call another batch file.

This post is part 6 of the "How I Pelican" series: