How to install nikola on ubuntu

So first of all, I switched this blog and in fact my whole website from wordpress to nikola. The nikola website explains what it is so I won't go into that here. However I will explain the reasons for the switch. I will also explain how I get the latest version of nikola on my ubuntu system.

Reasons for switching to nikola

1. I can write posts in my favorite editor (vim). Every post is just a text file written up in some markup language like reStructuredText.
2. I don't have to worry about security updates to nikola. Since the site that is generated by nikola is static, there is no code running over on the server. It's just a bunch of HTML and CSS documents. So you don't really have to worry about any security problems on your page.
3. It's very easy to keep all content for my website in source control.

Unfortunately, the switch from wordpress to nikola means that I pretty much lost all the comments. Well, I still have them but the comment system I used in wordpress was jetpack. The comment system I use in nikola is disqus. At the moment, I have no way to move the previous comments to the new system.

How to install nikola on ubuntu

1. sudo apt-get install python3 python3-dev libjpg-dev libxml2-dev libxslt-dev zlib1g-dev
2. python3 -m venv ~/software/nikola
3. source ~/software/nikola/bin/activate
4. pip install nikola livereload webassets

I should note that you could just install the distributions version of nikola. However, at the time of this writing on ubuntu 15.04 it's version 7.1.0. The current stable version of nikola is 7.5.0. That is why I created a python virtual environment, activated it and then installed it using pip. Now when you want to use it just type source ~/software/nikola/bin/activate. At that point you should be able to use nikola normally.

Update 2015-06-11: Remove optional steps from "How to install nikola on ubuntu" steps.