quickstart.md

Quickstart

From nothing to a served website in four commands.

1. Create a site

italic new my-site
cd my-site

This scaffolds an empty starter site, including a fully commented config.yaml that shows every available setting (all optional — italic is zero-config).

2. Add a page

echo '# Hello, world' > content/index.md

Any Markdown file in content/ becomes a page.

3. Serve it

italic serve

Congrats! You have a website at http://localhost:3000, rebuilding live on every change.

4. Add a theme (optional)

The default site is unstyled. Grab the starter themes and pick one:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gordonbrander/italic_themes.git themes/

# config.yaml
theme: "themes/obsidian"

Optionally add the theme's demo content to see it dressed:

italic scaffold

5. Build for publishing

italic build

The site lands in public/ — plain static files, ready for any host. See Deployment.

Where next

• Tutorial: publish your Obsidian vault — the full garden workflow: wikilinks, backlinks, tags, feeds.
• Project layout — what the scaffolded directories mean.
• Configuration reference — every config.yaml key.