Make the site

At the end of this part, the browser shows the site, still empty and waiting for its first page.

Make the site

In a terminal, in the folder where you keep your projects:

statac new hill-notes

Statac asks five questions. Type each answer and press Enter. If Statac offers an answer in brackets, Enter on its own takes it:

A new site in `hill-notes`.
Enter takes the answer in brackets.

What is the site title?
  [Hill Notes] >

What is the author's name?
  Enter for none.
  > Ailsa

What is the site URL?
  Enter for none yet.
  >

What is the site language?
  For more than one, the main one first, such as `en, fr`.
  In brackets: how this machine is set.
  [en-GB] >

What is the site time zone?
  In brackets: how this machine is set.
  [Europe/London] >

Statac offers the title from the folder’s name, and the language and time zone your computer is set to, so yours may differ: type en-GB and Europe/London if they do. Leave the URL empty for now: you add it when you publish, in part 5.

Made a new site in `hill-notes`: 2 files.

statac.yaml:
  title: Hill Notes
  author: Ailsa
  language: en-GB
  timezone: Europe/London

Statac made the folder hill-notes with:

• statac.yaml, the site’s settings, holding your answers. You can change any of them later: see Settings.
• .gitignore, which keeps Statac’s working files and the built site out of git, if you keep the site in git.
• content/, empty. Every page of the site goes in here.

Serve it

cd hill-notes
statac serve

Statac builds the site and serves it on your computer:

Wrote 0 pages to `.statac/serve` in 0.00 seconds.
Serving `.statac/serve` at http://localhost:3000/
Press Ctrl+C to stop.

Open http://localhost:3000/ in your browser. If something else is using port 3000, Statac takes the next free one, and its line says which.

The site has no pages yet, so the browser shows a page headed “No home page”, which lists the site’s pages. The list is empty, and says the last build made no pages. Statac shows this list only while it serves the site; it never publishes it.

Leave statac serve running. Each time you save a file in the site, it builds the site again and tells the browser to reload.

Next

In part 2, you write the site’s first page.