If you're setting up comic_git for the first time and you just want to get started quickly without delving into all comic_git's features, you only need to edit the [Comic Info] and [Links Bar] sections.
When setting up comic_git, there are some critical things you need to do to identify your comic, like give it a name or set up what links go in the Links Bar. comic_git also supports a few extra features that can be enabled for your project, like automatically generating thumbnails for your comic pages. All these settings can be adjusted in the comic_info.ini file in the your_content folder.
This is a standard .ini file that may be familiar to you if you've ever edited config files for other programs. If you haven't seen one before, it's just a text file with a special purpose, and you can edit it in Notepad or whichever text editor you're comfortable with.
Inside the file, the options format is very simple: The name of the option and its value, separated by an equals sign (for example, Title = Sample Comic). These options are also separated into sections (for example, [Comic Info]).
Sections are not just helpful categories; the program behind comic_git relies on finding specific options in specific sections. If you put an option in the wrong section or change the name of an option or section, at best comic_git will ignore it, and at worst it'll break your site. Be mindful when adding or deleting things!
Some options listed here may not be present in your comic_info.ini file. These options are not required and may be ignored if you have no need to adjust them.
Each of the sections and their options are described in more detail below.
[Comic Info]
Comic name
Required
Value: string: your comic name
This is the name of your comic. The comic name shows up in the tab every time a page from your website is loaded (for example, Page 202 - comic_git Example). It does not need to match the name you gave your repository.
Author
Required
Value: string: your authorial name
Whatever name or credit you wish to give for the creation of your comic. It can be a single name, a list of names, a sentence, whatever you want. It's currently only used when generating your RSS Feed.
This is used to determine which version of comic_git is used to build your site. The possible values are:
Version: By default, this value is set to version 1.0. Every time your site builds, this pulls the latest iteration of 1.0, such as 1.0.1, 1.0.2, and so on. This is the recommended setting to use if you want to get bug fixes automatically without future updates breaking your site. If and when comic_git is updated to 1.1, you'll need to change this to get the features that may be included with that.
Exact version: If you have a need to use one particular version, specify it by using the full version number; for example, 1.0.3. Your site will stay on that version and not receive any future bug fixes or version updates until you edit this again.
latest: Your site will always get the latest released version of comic_git, even if it's an update that could potentially break your site. If you want to automatically keep up with updates as they come out and don't mind fixing your site to adjust for new versions, this is a good option.
master: Keep up with every single new change to comic_git, no matter how minor or untested. Only recommended for troubleshooting.
Version releases are tracked on comic_git_engine's Releases page along with any necessary instructions for upgrading version (such as moving from 1.0 to 1.1). Announcements are also made on our Discord server.
This is the date format that all your comic Post dates will be in. The default format accepts dates written like July 20, 1969. You can change the format to any you prefer.
Be aware that you need to manually type in the date when adding a comic Post, and that date must match the format specified here. The format is specified here so that comic_git knows how to order your comics chronologically based on the dates in each Post.
If you use the default format, remember to include the comma after the day!
The following table is a list of common date format strings. You can copy/paste any of these into the Date format option to change what date format to use in your comic files. (See Adding Comic Pages for more info on setting the Post dates for your comics)
Format string
Example
%B %d, %Y
July 16, 1969
%Y-%m-%d
1969-07-16
%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S
Wed, 16 Jul 1969 04:20:00
You can also build your own format strings if you feel comfortable doing so. Use the list of Python %-substitutions to create your preferred date format.
The timezone for all the dates in your comic. This is important for when comic_git is determining when scheduled posts should be published. For example, if you push out an update at 9pm your time just before the midnight deadline, you don't want comic_git to publish the page right away just because it's past midnight in some other timezone!
If you are building your website locally, and you haven't configured a custom domain, you must set this so that comic_git knows what domain to use to build the URL to link to your comic, for the purposes of things like your RSS feed and your social media preview links. For more details, see Building your Website on your own PC.
This option should include your website's entire domain, subdomain, and top-level domain. Do not include the slash at the end. You may include the "http://" or "https://" if you wish.
If you're building your website locally and you have not set a custom domain, you must set this to the name of your GitHub repository. This allows most of the links on your website to function properly. For more details, see Building your Website on your own PC.
This option should not include leading or trailing slashes.
Examples: comic_git, tamberlane
Theme
Optional
Value: string: name of theme folder
Default: default
The name of the theme folder to use for your site. The theme folder must be located in your_content/themes.
Extra comics
Optional
Value: string: see below
Default: none
A comma-separated list of any extra comics hosted on your site. For more information, see Extra Comics.
Banner image
Optional
Value: string: path to image
Default: /your_content/images/banner.png
This option tells comic_git where to go to find the banner image for the comic, that big image that goes at the top of every page in the default comic_git website layout.
On comic click
Optional
Value: string: see below
Default: Next comic
This option defines the behavior of your site when a user clicks on your comic image when looking at the page for a specific comic. The available options are below:
Open image: Opens the image file in the current tab.
Open image window: Opens the image in a new tab or window.
Overlay: Opens the image in an overlay that appears in the same tab over your current comic page. Clicking the image will dismiss it.
All other options will default to navigating to the next comic, as if the user has clicked the "Next" navigation button.
Allow missing variables in templates
Optional
Value: boolean: True or False
Default: False
By default, if a Jinja template is expecting a variable that it did not receive while the site is building, the template will raise an error and the build will fail.
If you wish to allow for missing variables in your templates, you can set this value to True, and the template will treat any missing variables as empty strings. Note: If you are making custom templates that expect certain variables to be present, setting this to True can cause your templates to not render properly.
Markdown extras
Optional
Value string: see below
Default: none
A comma-separated list of extra settings that are passed into the Markdown parser to change its behavior. See this page for a list of many valid settings.
Note that not all settings are currently supported. For example, settings that require extra configuration alongside the setting name (e.g. breaks).
[Pages]
This is a special section without pre-defined options. This section tells comic_git what extra web pages beyond the standard comic pages to build.
Format: option = value
The option on the left of the equals sign is the template file name to use. Do not include the extension; if you have a cast.html page, you'd only put cast here.
The value on the right of the equals sign is the title of the page once it's built.
The section has been pre-populated with pages that are commonly included in webcomics. If you wish to remove a default web page like tagged pages or the Latest page, delete that line from this section.
For more info on adding pages to your website, see Themes.
[Links Bar]
This is another special section without pre-defined options. This section tells comic_git how to build out the Links Bar.
Format: option = value
The option on the left of the equals sign is the text displayed on the link.
The value on the right of the equals sign is the URL the link should go to. Any values that start with / will link to a page on your website. All other links will be treated as external links to other websites.
This section has been pre-populated with common links. Feel free to change the URLs to existing links, delete any lines you don't want to use, and add lines you want to use as links.
[Navigation Bar]
Use images
Optional
Value: boolean: True or False
Default: False
When set to true, this will replace the First, Previous, Next, and Latest navigation links on the comic pages with the icons found in your_content/images/navigation_icons/. You can change which icons are used by replacing these files with your own, or keep this setting on false to just use text links.
Above comic
Optional
Value: boolean: True or False
Default: False
When set to true, this will place a navigation bar above the comic.
Below comic
Optional
Value: boolean: True or False
Default: True
When set to true, this will place a navigation bar below the comic but above the blurb containing the comic title, post date, post text, etc.
Below blurb
Optional
Value: boolean: True or False
Default: False
When set to true, this will place a navigation bar below the blurb containing the comic title, post date, post text, etc.
[Archive]
Use thumbnails
Required
Value: boolean: True or False
When this value is False, the Archive page will display all the comics in your archive in an unordered list, broken up by storyline. When this value is True, the Archive page will display all the comics in your archive in a grid of comic thumbnails. When looking for thumbnails, the Archive page looks in each comic directory for a thumbnail image by the name of _thumbnail.jpg
You can either create your own thumbnails or use comic_git's built-in thumbnail generation as described in the [Image Reprocessing] section below.
Default: The value you provided for the Date format option in Comic Settings
This is the format that post dates are displayed in when Use thumbnails is set to True. This is defined separately from page date formats because longer post dates can screw up the spacing of the thumbnails in the grid. It accepts the same inputs as the Date format in the [Comic Settings] section.
Show Uncategorized comics
Optional
Value: boolean: True or False
Default: True
By default, if you don't give a comic page a Storyline value in its info.ini file, it will be placed in an "Uncategorized" section in your Archive page below all your other comic pages. If you wish for these uncategorized pages to just not show up on your Archive page, set this value to False.
[Image Reprocessing]
Create thumbnails
Required
Value: boolean: True or False
If set to True, thumbnails will be generated for each comic page. The files will be located in each page directory in /your_content/comics named _thumbnail.jpg.
Thumbnail size
Required
Value: string: see below
The size of the thumbnail to be generated. This can be a width/height pair in pixels like 100, 36, a percentage of the size of the original image like 10%, a set height in pixels (100h), or a set width in pixels (100w). For the latter two options, comic_git will keep the aspect ratio of the original image the same, adjusting to fit just your defined height or width.
Overwrite existing images
Required
Value: boolean: True or False
When set to False and a thumbnail already exists in the comic page's folder, comic_git will not attempt to recreate the thumbnail. When set to True, comic_git will always attempt to generate a thumbnail, assuming creating these files is enabled via one of the options above.
[RSS Feed]
This section is covered in Adding an RSS Feed. If you don't need to create an RSS feed, you can leave this section alone.
[Transcripts]
Enable transcripts
Required
Value: boolean: True or False
When set to True, comic_git will attempt to create a Transcripts section below every comic that has transcripts files provided for it. A transcript file is a text file with the name of the language as its filename, e.g. English.txt. The transcript file can contain plain text, unicode (for those fancy accents and non-roman alphabets), HTML tags, and Markdown.
Default language
Optional
Value: string: name of a transcript file
Default: English
The transcript .txt file with the specified name is placed at the top of the list of transcripts. Whenever the comic page is loaded, this transcript is the one that's automatically loaded.
Load transcripts from comic folder
Optional
Value: boolean: True or False
Default: True
When set to True, comic_git will search in each comic page's folder for any .txt files (except for post.txt). Any it finds is added to the list of available transcripts for that comic page.
When set to False, comic_git will not look in the comic folders. If Transcripts folder (see next option) is defined, comic_git will still look in that folder for any transcripts regardless of this option's setting.
Transcripts folder
Optional
Value: string: name of transcripts folder
Default: none
If you wish to move the transcripts to their own folder, you can define that folder here. Each page must have a separate folder that matches the comic folder name. For example, if you set the transcripts folder to be your_content/transcripts, then the transcript files for Page 197 should be found at your_content/transcripts/Page 197/. This path is always relative to the root of the repository.
Both this option and Load transcripts from comic folder can be set, so you can have transcripts in both places. Files in your transcripts folder take precedence over transcript files in your comic folder with the same name.
[Google Analytics]
Tracking ID
Optional
Value: string: your Google Analytics tracking ID
Default: none
If you have set up a Google Analytics for your comic, you can put the Tracking ID here (for example, UA-123456789-0) and comic_git will automatically insert the analytics tracking code on all pages of your website.
