A few years back when I was work­ing at Canon­i­cal, I made Niko­la pack­ages for the Snap store ... which sad­ly got ne­glect­ed a fair amount af­ter I stopped work­ing there.

SO ... while I don't work there, there is no rea­son for ne­glec­t, so I just fixed the build, up­dat­ed some snapcraft.yml de­tails that had rust­ed from dis­use, checked the au­to­mat­ed build and pro­mot­ed cur­rent git mas­ter to the "stable" chan­nel.

What does this mean for you?

Well, prob­a­bly noth­ing, but if you want to try Niko­la, you can do this:

snap install nikola

At least in Ubuntu, Ubuntu derivatives and Arch derivatives if you have snapd installed, and end up with a working installation of Nikola.

Now, is this the rec­om­mend­ed way to get it? No. This has a num­ber of prob­lems be­cause of the na­ture of snap pack­ag­ing.

• You can't launch bi­na­ries so some fea­tures will just not work (ex­am­ple: niko­la serve -b).

• You can't in­­stall python pack­­ages in­­­to the snap, so if you in­­stall a plug­in with a python de­pen­­den­­cy, it will not work un­­less by chance that de­pen­­den­­cy is there al­ready (I added some!)

• I am not test­ing it much, so there is no guar­an­­tee it works on any giv­en day (But it should!)

If you are us­ing Niko­la as a snap and run in­to any is­sues, ping me via an is­sue. Some­times I may take a while to get to it, but I will get to it.

Since ev­ery­one is in lock­down and I am no ex­cep­tion, I have spent some of my time do­ing things in open source project­s. Let me in­tro­duce you two new plug­ins for Niko­la my favourite stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor.

1. marko

   Yet an­oth­er im­­ple­­men­­ta­­tion of Mark­­down! And since adding sup­­port for new im­­ple­­men­­ta­­tions of mark­­down is easy, I added it.

   Marko has some in­­ter­est­ing ideas. If a ecosys­tem of ex­ten­­sions de­vel­op­s, it will be easy to sup­­port them on the Niko­la side.

2. myst

   Yes, an­oth­er mark­­down but, again, one with orig­i­­nal ideas. In this case, myst has a lot of re­Struc­­tured Text flavour, with sup­­port for di­rec­­tives and roles.

Of course when us­ing marko or myst in Niko­la you al­so get sup­port for short­codes so they are ex­tra-ex­ten­si­ble here.

If you are look­ing for a stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor, I am fair­ly sure "it does­n't sup­port my favourite markup lan­guage" is not a rea­son not to choose Niko­la :-)