Quickstart

A site running in five minutes. Assumes you’ve installed the binary.

baudelaire init my-site
cd my-site
baudelaire serve

That’s a live site on localhost:1821, rebuilding on every save.

Scaffold

init asks what to start from, then for a title, an author, a base URL and whether to set up version control. It writes a config.kdl, a content/ tree with a couple of example pages, the templates/ that render them, and an assets/style.css. Pass -y to take every default and skip the prompts.

The first question offers the four starter shapes and the four themes the binary carries. Naming either on the command line (-t, --theme) answers it, and the prompt is skipped.

The default shape is a blog. Four ship:

--with switches on optional features while scaffolding, and takes any of spa, standalone, speculation, search, pdf:

baudelaire init my-docs -t docs --with search,spa

--theme scaffolds against a theme instead of a shape: the config states the site’s identity and paths, and the theme brings the templates, the assets and the collections.

baudelaire init my-site --theme "themes/albatros"

A theme the binary carries is written into that directory on the spot, so this is a site that builds. A spec naming anything else is a directory init cannot fill, and it closes by saying so.

See themes.

Serve

baudelaire serve

Binds 127.0.0.1:1821, opens a browser, watches content/, templates/, assets/, static/ and config.kdl, and pushes a reload over Server-Sent Events on every rebuild. --port and --bind override the config, --no-open skips the browser. More on it in the dev server page.

Leave it running for the rest of this page.

Write a page

baudelaire new posts/first-post --no-draft

That writes content/posts/first-post.typ, with the title derived from the filename and today’s date filled in (because the posts collection sorts by date). Without --no-draft the page is written as a draft, and drafts are excluded from the build until you pass --drafts or set content { drafts }.

It arrives with the standard fields filled in. Open it and write:

#let frontmatter = (
  title: "First Post",
  date: datetime(year: 2026, month: 8, day: 2),
  tags: ("intro",),
  description: "Shown under the entry in the index.",
)

This is *real Typst*, not markdown. You get functions, variables, imports,
math like $e^(i pi) + 1 = 0$, and the whole standard library.

#let half-life(name, years) = [#name decays with a half-life of #years years.]
#half-life("Carbon-14", 5730)

Save it and the browser reloads. The post is at /posts/first-post/, listed on /posts/, and filed under /tags/intro/.

The file’s location decides its collection and its URL. content/posts/ is the posts collection because config.kdl says so, and everything about how a page is grouped, ordered and addressed follows from there. See pages and collections.

Every key frontmatter understands is on frontmatter. description above fills the meta tag, the feed entry and the search index, and a listing reads it back as entry.description. Keys baudelaire doesn’t claim are yours, and reach a template as entry.extra.<key>.

Build

baudelaire build

The site lands in public/, ready for any static host. A rebuild only touches what you edited; everything else comes from cache. Add --profile prod to apply a profile, -o dist to write elsewhere.

Then deploy it.

Where to go next