Italic

A static site generator for digital gardens.

• Built for thinkers: wikilinks, backlinks, custom collections, related notes, custom taxonomies, and more.
• Batteries included: One binary with everything you need. Zero config required.
• Fast: Build thousands of pages in < 1s. Written in Rust with an embarrassingly parallel rendering pipeline.

Features

Italic makes it easy to publish a digital garden from your Obsidian Vault, or any other folder full of Markdown.

• Markdown extensions: compatible with GitHub-flavored Markdown and Obsidian Markdown
• Wikilinks: fuzzy link matching using the same algorithm as Obsidian
• Backlinks: see what links into a page
• Hashtags: auto-appended to tags and stripped from output
• Related: surface related pages, scored over taxonomies and the link graph

Plus everything else you'd expect from a static site generator, and a few extras:

• Blog-aware: publish multiple blogs from the same site
• Custom collections: a powerful query system collects pages into any grouping you want
• Multiple taxonomies: categorize by tag, series, publication, phase of the moon — no problem
• Themes, powerful Tera templates, shortcodes
• Archives, drafts, RSS feeds, sitemaps, and more

Install

cargo install italic

This puts italic on your PATH (typically ~/.cargo/bin/italic).

Quick start

italic new my-site
cd my-site
echo '# Hello, world' > content/index.md
italic serve

Congrats! You have a website at http://localhost:3000.

To dress it up, grab a starter theme:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gordonbrander/italic_themes.git themes/

# config.yaml
theme: "themes/obsidian"

Then italic build outputs plain static files to public/, ready for any host. The quickstart covers all of this in more detail.

Documentation

Full documentation lives in docs/:

• Quickstart — zero to website in four commands
• Tutorial — publish your Obsidian vault, with backlinks, tags, and feeds
• Concepts — project layout, content model, the build pipeline
• Guides — wikilinks, related pages, collections, taxonomies, templates, archives & feeds, themes, deployment, migration, and more
• Reference — CLI, configuration, frontmatter, templates

License

AGPL — see LICENSE-AGPL.