Getting Started

This guide covers installing Sarde and creating a first website with it. No step assumes prior experience with build tools. By the end, a themed site is running in the browser and updating itself on every save, a first page sits in the sidebar, and a production build waits in dist/, ready to put on the web.

Install Sarde

brew install getsarde/sarde/sarde

curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/getsarde/sarde/main/install.sh | sh

go install github.com/getsarde/sarde/cmd/sarde@latest

Verify the installation:

sarde version

→ The terminal prints:

sarde 1.0.0
Go: go1.25.0
OS/Arch: linux/amd64

Create a site

One command produces a complete, working site: configuration, a homepage, a sample blog post, and a sample docs page. There is nothing to assemble before seeing results; writing can start from a site that already works.

sarde new site my-site
cd my-site

→ The terminal prints:

Created new site at /path/to/my-site
  Run 'sarde dev' to start the dev server.

The scaffolded project contains everything needed to start:

my-site/
  sarde.yaml            # Site configuration
  kazari.config.yaml    # Code block highlighting settings
  content/
    _index.md            # Homepage
    blog/
      _index.md
      hello-world.md     # Sample blog post
    docs/
      _index.md
      getting-started.md # Sample docs page
  public/
    images/
  .gitignore

The sarde.yaml file controls the site title, theme preset, homepage hero, and all other settings; see Configuration for the full reference. The kazari.config.yaml file controls syntax highlighting, covered in Code Blocks.

Start the dev server

The dev server is a private preview of the site, running only on this machine; nobody else can see it. It watches the project's files, and every time a file is saved it rebuilds the affected pages and refreshes the browser on its own. Leave it running in the terminal while writing.

sarde dev

→ The terminal prints:

 sarde  v1.0.0 ready in 320 ms
┃ Local    http://localhost:4727
┃ Network  use --host 0.0.0.0 to expose

Open http://localhost:4727 in a browser.

→ A finished-looking site appears: a homepage with a hero section, a navigation bar linking to the sample blog and docs pages, working search, and a dark mode toggle. All of it comes from the scaffold; no configuration was involved.

From here on, the loop is: edit a file, save, glance at the browser. The page refreshes automatically, and CSS changes appear without even a page reload.

Draft, scheduled, and expired content is included by default in dev mode. Use --no-drafts to exclude it.

Add content

Time to add a page of your own. sarde new creates the file in the right folder with the metadata already filled in:

sarde new docs "My First Page"

→ The terminal prints:

Created content/docs/my-first-page.md

Open content/docs/my-first-page.md in an editor. The file starts with frontmatter, a short metadata block between --- fences that sets the page title and other fields. Sarde pre-fills it:

---
draft: true
title: My First Page
date: 2026-03-15T09:00:00-05:00
---

The draft: true line marks the page as work in progress: the dev server shows it, but sarde build leaves it out. Remove the line (or set it to false) when the page is ready to publish.

Add Markdown content below the frontmatter and save the file:

## Welcome
This page was created with `sarde new docs`.
:::note
Sarde's Markdown goes beyond the basics. Asides like this one, tabs, cards,
and more are built in.
:::

The browser updates automatically, the new page appears in the sidebar navigation, and the :::note block renders as a colored callout. See Using Extensions for the full extended syntax.

Sarde auto-detects the collection type from the directory name. Content in docs/ gets the docs layout with sidebar navigation, while content in blog/ gets the blog layout with date-sorted posts.

Build the site

Building is the step that turns the project into something publishable. The dev server renders pages on demand for one viewer; a build writes every page out ahead of time as plain files, so a web host can serve them to anyone without running Sarde at all.

Remove the draft: true line from the new page, then build:

sarde build

→ The terminal prints:

Built in 320 ms
  Output: /path/to/my-site/dist

The dist/ directory is the complete site as plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It needs no server-side runtime, so any static host can serve it. Deploying covers publishing it to GitHub Pages, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, or a custom target.

Next steps

• Writing Content covers frontmatter, drafts, and page bundles
• Content and Collections explains how folders become blogs, docs, and courses
• Using Extensions tours the extended Markdown: asides, tabs, cards, and more
• Deploying publishes the site to the web