1-quick-start.md

Quick start

This guide walks you through creating your first Cecil website, previewing it locally, then building and deploying it.

Create a website

You can create a new website from scratch in a few minutes.

Follow the steps below to create your first Cecil website.

:::info Demo of the expected result: https://cecilapp.github.io/skeleton/. :::

Prerequisites

• PHP 8.3+
• Terminal (a basic understanding of the terminal)
• Text editor, such as VS Code and/or Typora

Step by step

::::steps

Download Cecil

Download cecil.phar from your terminal:

curl -LO https://cecil.app/cecil.phar

You can also download Cecil manually, or install it globally with a package manager, then run cecil instead of php cecil.phar:

:::code-group

Homebrew

brew install cecilapp/tap/cecil

Scoop

scoop install https://cecil.app/scoop/cecil.json

:::

See Installation for other methods.

Create a new site

Create a directory for the website (e.g. <mywebsite>), put cecil.phar in it, then run the new:site command:

php cecil.phar new:site

Add a page

Run the new:page command:

php cecil.phar new:page

Now you can edit the newly created page with your Markdown editor: <mywebsite>/pages/<new-page>.md.

:::tip We recommend using Typora to edit your Markdown files. :::

Check the preview

Run the following command to create a preview of the website:

php cecil.phar serve

Then navigate to http://localhost:8000.

:::info The serve command runs a local HTTP server and a watcher: if a file (a page, a template or the config) is modified, the browser’s current page is automatically reloaded. :::

Build and deploy

When you are satisfied with the result, you can generate the website in order to deploy it to the Web.

Run the following command to build the website:

php cecil.phar build

You can now copy the content of the _site directory to a Web server 🎉 ::::

:::tip To deploy automatically on each push to your Git repository, see Deploy. :::

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