Print the last modification of a jinja2 template in pelican

Question

I am using Pelican 3.3 and I have an almost static file index.html in my jinja2 templates. I would like to display the date of the last modification of the file within it.

I found quite easily that article.locale_date and page.locale_date are doing the job for articles and pages (with DEFAULT_DATE = 'fs'). But, I cannot figure out how to do this for a template file.

I found some suggestions about using a Python function through other Python modules such as Flask or Environment. But, is there a simpler way to get the date of last modification of a template file ?

Answer 1

I found a dirty trick, so I still hope that somebody will answer this question in a more nicer way than I did.

The point is to use the pelicanconf.py file to set up an environment variable to get the required date. I just added the following to pelicanconf.py:

import os.path, time
INDEX_DATE = time.ctime(os.path.getmtime(path/to/the/index.html))

Once you get the INDEX_DATE variable set, you can use it in your Jinja2 templates like this:

{{ INDEX_DATE }}

So, this is a quick and dirty trick. Hopefully, somebody will give me a better way !