Posts about nikola

Upgrading Nikola: some pitfalls and how I climbed out of them

After some hacking of my dotfiles and python settings, I lost my nikola virtual environment (I think it broke after a brew update or something. The hacking's only partly recorded in the issues on GitHub).

But that's no biggie, just make a new one and re-install, right? Well, not quite. The re-install gives you the latest Nikola (great!) and that means I have to review and update my conf.py (okay...) and figure out runtime errors like this:

[src:?][mjl@milo:~/hax/net/blog/milosophical.me]
[07:27](nikola)$ nikola version
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/mjl/lib/nikola/bin/nikola", line 11, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/Users/mjl/lib/nikola/lib/python3.6/site-packages/nikola/__main__.py", line 171, in main
    _ = DN.run(oargs)
  File "/Users/mjl/lib/nikola/lib/python3.6/site-packages/nikola/__main__.py", line 339, in run
    self.nikola.init_plugins()
  File "/Users/mjl/lib/nikola/lib/python3.6/site-packages/nikola/nikola.py", line 1077, in init_plugins
    self._activate_plugins_of_category("SignalHandler")
  File "/Users/mjl/lib/nikola/lib/python3.6/site-packages/nikola/nikola.py", line 1233, in _activate_plugins_of_category
    plugin_info.plugin_object.set_site(self)
  File "/Users/mjl/lib/nikola/lib/python3.6/site-packages/nikola/plugins/misc/taxonomies_classifier.py", line 328, in set_site
    self._register_path_handlers(taxonomy)
  File "/Users/mjl/lib/nikola/lib/python3.6/site-packages/nikola/plugins/misc/taxonomies_classifier.py", line 316, in _register_path_handlers
    doc = taxonomy.path_handler_docstrings[name]
KeyError: 'page_index_folder_index'

(well, pooh).

I decided a while back that I wasn't going to meta-blog (otherwise most of my posts would be about blogging!), but I think in this case, Rule 4 will come to the rescue. Anyway at least you know this story has a happy ending, or else I wouldn't be able to add this new_post!

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Meta: Setting up Nikola blogging

Tonight I thought that I'd sit down at my home server, Tesla, and do a bit of blogging. This server's recently been rebuilt after a bad run-in with a hard-drive problem and I had not got around to putting my blog onto it. Instead I was blogging with work's laptop.

After spending an hour cloning and installing my blog repositories and the necessary software through trial-and-error, I thought it best to write down what is necessary to bootstrap my blogging environment, and save myself some trouble in the future.

Ideally I will make a script to get most of this going soon … but in the meantime, you are treated to a meta-blog.

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