Overview

If you have a GRAMPS family tree, you can use greatgramps to build a static HTML website from it, making it easy to browse yourself, and share with family.

Build your tree

If you’re looking to get started building your tree, check out the GRAMPS documentation.

GRAMPS supports importing a tree from a GEDCOM file, which is a common format for exchanging genealogical data, so if you have a tree from another source (like Ancestry.com), you can import it into GRAMPS and then use greatgramps to build your site. You may wish to make use of the GRAMPS Features supported by greatgramps, such as media, shared events and tags.

Configure your site build

You’ll need to know:

  • Your GRAMPS database location

  • The IDs of any people you wish to build the tree for

GRAMPS database location

Find the location of your GRAMPS database. Default locations on different systems can be:

  • ~/.gramps/grampsdb

  • ~/.local/gramps/grampsdb

  • ~/Library/Application Support/gramps/grampsdb

Within this directory will be a directory with an 8-character name for each of your GRAMPS trees. Use the full path to the desired tree.

If you need help finding your database location, open the Family Trees dialogue in GRAMPS, and click Info on the desired tree. See the Path field for the full path.

Config file

Create a config.yml file with the contents:

db_path: /path/to/your/grampsdb/xxxxxxxx
roots:
- I0001
- I0002

Create a .env file with an environment variable setting your config file:

GREATGRAMPS_CONFIG=config.yml

Build your site

Run grgr build to build your site into www.

Serving locally

Serve your site locally with e.g. python -m http.server -d www. This will start a local web server at http://localhost:8000. Alternatively, use a web server of your choice to serve the www directory.

Hosting your site

You can host your site on any web server that serves static files. Bundle the www directory and upload it to your web server. You may wish to put the site behind a password-protected virtual host or similar.

Note

A bundled 404.html is included in the output, so you can configure your web server to use this page for any 404 errors.

CLI

The grgr command line tool provides a limited set of commands for managing your tree. These can be used to make it easier to perform certain tasks outside of GRAMPS. See CLI for more information on these commands.