How to run the content management system

Basic use

After saving your work within articles/ and lit/, chdir to your documentation root; e.g., the directory where articles/, bin/, lit/, omit/, and site/ exist. Then run:

$ bin/me4.py

There may be some output to indicate the script’s progress. Hopefully there will be no errors. At that point, the website contents will be available under site/.

Local viewing

Local viewing in a browser is tricky, and the process depends strongly on the environment. One challenge is there are no .html file extensions, which means that most browsers will not know the content type and display each page (at best) as if the markup was plain text. This can be worked around by running a web server locally with the empty file extension specified as text/html.

The next challenge is attaching a host name to the local HTTP server, if desired. It used to be that changing /etc/hosts was enough, but as of 2025, changes to /etc/nsswitch.conf as well as possibly using a specific browser may be needed.

Making CSS changes visible

Browsers sometimes hang on to old styling unless a “full reload” (not the same command as an ordinary reload) is done. How do accomplish this is browser-dependent.