Start off your Metalsmith journey with this bare-bones boilerplate. This starter includes Markdown content and Nunjucks templating. Check out a demo of this starter.

Quick start

1. Create a Metalsmith site.

   Clone the starter repository to create a new site.

   git clone https://github.com/wernerglinka/metalsmith-bare-bones-starter.git new-site 

2. Start developing.

   Navigate into your new site’s directory and start it up.

   cd new-site/
   npm install
   npm start

3. Open the source code and start editing!

   Your site is now running at http://localhost:3000!

   Open the new-site directory in your code editor of choice and edit src/content/index.md. Save your changes and the browser will update in real time!

4. To tidy up your code with ESlint and Prettier, run: npm run lint.

What's included?

A quick look at the top-level files and directories you'll see in this Metalsmith project.

.
├── node_modules
├── src
├── layouts
├── .eslintrc.yml
├── .gitignore
├── .gitattributes
├── .prettierignore
├── .prettierrc.yml
├── LICENSE
├── metalsmith.js
├── package-lock.json
├── package.json
└── README.md

1. node_modules: This directory contains all the node modules that your project depends on.

2. src: This directory will contain all the content that makes up your site.

3. layouts: This directory will contain all the layouts partials that will be used to render your site.

4. .eslintrc.yml: This file contains all rules for eslint.

5. .gitignore: This file tells git which files it should not track / not maintain a version history for.

6. .prettierrc: This is a configuration file for Prettier. Prettier is a tool to help keep the formatting of your code consistent.

7. .prettierignore: This file tells prettier what files it should ignore.

8. LICENSE: This Metalsmith starter is licensed under the MIT license.

9. metalsmith.js: This is the Metalsmith build file.

10. package-lock.json (See package.json below, first). This is an automatically generated file based on the exact versions of your npm dependencies that were installed for your project. (You won’t change this file directly).

11. package.json: A manifest file for Node.js projects, which includes things like metadata (the project’s name, author, etc). This manifest is how npm knows which packages to install for your project.

12. README.md: A text file containing useful reference information about your project.

Learn more about Metalsmith

Looking for more guidance? Full documentation for Metalsmith can be found on the website.

Deploy

Deploy and Host on any static hosting service. For example Netlify, Vercel or Cloudflare Pages.

Here is an article about how to deploy Metalsmith on Netlify.