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Quick Start

This guide walks through getting Plinth running locally and publishing your first blog post.

1. Start the server

git clone https://codeberg.org/caniko/plinth.git
cd plinth
nix develop
./scripts/dev-db.sh start
cargo leptos watch

The dev-db.sh script starts a local Postgres cluster with pgvector and creates the plinth database. The dev shell exports DATABASE_URL automatically.

Open http://127.0.0.1:3000 in your browser. You should see the default Plinth homepage.

2. Customise your site

Create or edit plinth.toml in the project root:

[site]
name = "My Site"
tagline = "Welcome to my corner of the internet"

[site.author]
name = "Your Name"
email = "you@example.com"

Restart the server to pick up changes.

3. Publish a blog post

Create a Markdown file my-first-post.md:

---
title: My First Post
tags: ["hello", "plinth"]
description: Getting started with Plinth
---

# Hello, world!

This is my first blog post on Plinth.

Publish it using the CLI:

cargo run --package plinth-cli -- publish my-first-post.md

The CLI parses frontmatter, generates a vector embedding for semantic search, and sends the article to the server API.

4. View your post

Navigate to http://127.0.0.1:3000/posts to see your published post.

Next steps