Pelican v4.8.0 outputs duplicate content into output directory root

[mlindgren]

I have a blog built on Pelican that I haven't been actively maintaining since 2017. I recently had a reason to update it again, so I started by installing the latest Pelican version. After regenerating my site, I noticed that all of the output is being duplicated: each article gets written once into my ARTICLE_SAVE_AS path as expected, and then again into output/{slug}.html. For example, for one article I get these two outputs:

• output/entry/2015/12/27/early-access-roundup/index.html
• output/early-access-roundup.html

I don't want the second one, as I don't like how it clutters up the output directory. Is this standard Pelican behavior now, or is it a bug? If the former, is there a way to disable it?

In case it helps, my complete pelicanconf.py is here; this repo also contains the rest of the content for the site.

[justinmayer]

I don't see anything in your settings file that would cause that. I suggest running pelican-quickstart to create a new site. Then copy over your content. Then edit the generated settings file and only change the ARTICLE_URL and ARTICLE_SAVE_AS settings to the desired patterns. Then generate the site and see if you see the same duplicate behavior described above.

[avaris]

Are you sure you're not looking at the output of multiple pelican runs with different configurations? I'd suggest clearing your output folder and checking again: either manually or via running pelican with --delete-output-directory option.

[mlindgren]

This was it, thanks! I'm a bit embarrassed that this hadn't occurred to me. I guess the first time I ran Pelican after upgrading, something about my old config file caused this issue, and then after fixing that I didn't clean the output directory before subsequent runs.

[mlindgren]

@avaris By the way, I didn't want to overcomplicate this issue, but it seems relevant now: part of the reason I had trouble root-causing this is because Pelican's logging is not printing format strings correctly; the %s values are not replaced. e.g.

INFO: Writing %s
INFO: Writing %s
INFO: Creating directory %s
INFO: Creating directory %s
INFO: Copying %s to %s
INFO: Copying %s to %s

Any idea what's causing that?

[avaris]

No, that's not normal. If you can describe a way to reproduce that I'll look into it.