A Hello World Site

This tutorial assumes you've installed mdsite.

Step 1: Create a directory for your project

cd ~/Desktop
mkdir mdsite-tutorial
cd mdsite-tutorial

Optionally, initialize a git repository so you can version your site and deploy it to GitLab Pages or GitHub Pages:

git init

Step 2: Create a src/ directory and a hello.md file

mkdir src
echo '# Hello, world!' > src/hello.md

Step 3: Run mdsite

While still in the directory that contains your src directory, run:

mdsite

You'll see a warning about template.html not existing; that's fine.

To check that it worked, list the entries in your current directory with ls. You should see the docs directory that mdsite generated.

Step 4: Serve

Run:

npx http-server -o -c-1 -p 3000 docs

to serve your docs folder to your local network over HTTP.

You should now be able to visit http://localhost:3000 and see the homepage that mdsite built! It will have a link to your hello world page.

What Just Happened?

By default, mdsite reads Markdown files from the src directory and generates HTML in a docs directory.

In this tutorial, we created a single Markdown file src/hello.md with no mdsite-specific formatting. mdsite built us a small but complete website, including an index page with a link to our hello page.

This demonstrates the power of mdsite to produce usable output with zero configuration. However, we've just scratched the surface of what mdsite can do. In future tutorials, we'll see how to theme our site with custom templates and CSS. We'll also learn how to add tables of contents and breadcrumbs like the ones on this page.