Quickstart

Scaffold, build, and preview a new aardvark site in under a minute.

1. Scaffold a site

vark new my-docs
cd my-docs

This creates a project with a starter page, a data file, the editable default theme, an example snippet, and a package.json for the islands.

2. Install islands dependencies

npm install

This installs React, Mantine, and esbuild — used to bundle the components you embed.

3. Develop with live reload

vark dev --port 8000

vark dev builds the site, serves it on http://127.0.0.1:8000, opens that URL in your browser, watches your source files, and reloads the browser on every change. Pass --no-open if you’d rather open the tab yourself.

4. Build for production

vark build      # outputs static HTML to ./build

Your first page

A page is Markdown with optional YAML frontmatter. Logic is real Python inside {% %} tags:

---
title: Hello
---

# Hello

This site has {% len(components) %} Mantine components available.

{% component('Button', children='Click me', color='blue') %}

That’s it. Continue with Project structure or jump to Templating & data.