Quick start - for the impatient

This chapter guides you very quickly from installation to a fully-running site. For more information, please refer to the rest of the documentation.

Step 1 - get pcms

You only need a single pcms binary to run a website. Check out the next chapters for a brief description how you get one.

As pre-built binary

You can download a pcms binary from a pre-built release from github:

https://github.com/bylexus/pcms/releases

Download and extract the pcms binary that fits your OS and architecture.

As go source code

You can build pcms from the go source code:

• install the go build toolchain
• clone the pcms source code from git:

$ git clone https://github.com/bylexus/pcms.git

• build it:

$ cd pcms
$ make build # ==> build goes to bin/pcms

Step 2 - init your project

pcms comes with a built-in starter template, which makes it easy to get started.

Open a terminal, and create a new pcms skeleton:

$ pcms init [project-path]
$ cd [project-path]
$ pcms serve

And done! Your site is serving on http://localhost:3000/!

Step 3 - Generate content!

The site skeleton is already up and running - now it’s time to look at the folder structure and implement some content.

After initializing a skeleton app with pcms init, you get the following file structure (content a bit redacted for brevity):

.
├── pcms-config.yaml
├── site
│   ├── page.json
│   ├── index.html
│   ├── favicon.png
│   ├── html-page
│   │   ├── index.html
│   │   ├── page.json
│   │   └── sunset.webp
│   ├── markdown-page
│   │   ├── index.md
│   │   ├── page.json
│   │   └── sunset.webp
│   └── restricted
│       ├── index.html
│       └── page.json
└── themes
    └── default
        ├── static
        │   ├── css
        │   │   └── main.css
        │   └── sunset.webp
        └── templates
            ├── base.html
            ├── error.html
            └── markdown.html

Your page content goes to the site folder, while your site design (theme) goes to the themes/[theme-name] folder (here: default). The used theme is configured in site-config.json, and can be adapted as needed: The theme name is just the folder name in themes.

Inspect the folder structure to see how they work. It is really simple:

• the main config file is pcms-config.yaml in the base directory. It stores all the important information to run your site.
• each page in site/ has a page.json config file: This defines a “page”, and is therefore available as URL route directly.
• The page folder also contains additional content / template files
• the index property defines the page index file as well as the page type: "index": "index.html" means you create an HTML file in index.html, while "index": "index.md" means you create an Markdown file in index.md.

Step 4: Edit, stop, restart

Until today, pcms does not notice if you make changes in config files or at the page structure. So for now, if you insert new pages or change config entries (even in page.json), you have to restart pcms: Just CTRL-c it and start it again.

Step 5: … and beyond!

Please have a look at the other chapters for a more detailed description on how to configure and use pcms.