Generating a static site

This document describes how to render your Wagtail site into static HTML files on your local filesystem, Amazon S3 or Google App Engine, using django medusa and the wagtail.contrib.wagtailmedusa module.

Installing django-medusa

First, install django medusa from pip:

pip install django-medusa

Then add django_medusa and wagtail.contrib.wagtailmedusa to INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
   ...
   'django_medusa',
   'wagtail.contrib.wagtailmedusa',
]

Rendering

To render a site, run ./manage.py staticsitegen. This will render the entire website and place the HTML in a folder called ‘medusa_output’. The static and media folders need to be copied into this folder manually after the rendering is complete. This feature inherits django-medusa’s ability to render your static site to Amazon S3 or Google App Engine; see the medusa docs for configuration details.

To test, open the ‘medusa_output’ folder in a terminal and run python -m SimpleHTTPServer.

Advanced topics

Replacing GET parameters with custom routing

Pages which require GET parameters (e.g. for pagination) don’t generate suitable filenames for generated HTML files so they need to be changed to use custom routing instead.

For example, let’s say we have a Blog Index which uses pagination. We can override the route method to make it respond on urls like ‘/page/1’, and pass the page number through to the serve method:

from wagtail.wagtailcore.url_routing import RouteResult

class BlogIndex(Page):
    ...

    def serve(self, request, page=1):
        ...

    def route(self, request, path_components):
        if self.live and len(path_components) == 2 and path_components[0] == 'page':
            try:
                return RouteResult(self, kwargs={'page': int(path_components[1])})
            except (TypeError, ValueError):
                pass

        return super(BlogIndex, self).route(request, path_components)

Rendering pages which use custom routing

For page types that override the route method, we need to let django medusa know which URLs it responds on. This is done by overriding the get_static_site_paths method to make it yield one string per URL path.

For example, the BlogIndex above would need to yield one URL for each page of results:

def get_static_site_paths(self):
    # Get page count
    page_count = ...

    # Yield a path for each page
    for page in range(page_count):
        yield '/%d/' % (page + 1)

    # Yield from superclass
    for path in super(BlogIndex, self).get_static_site_paths():
        yield path