Markdown in, pages out
Point atlas at a folder. Every file becomes a page, and the folder names become the paths.
Write pages. Ship a site.
atlas reads a folder of Markdown and writes the whole site. It rebuilds while you type and puts the result online with one command.
npm i -g atlas
Who writes with it
Handbooks, changelogs and product sites, kept by the people who write them rather than the people who deploy them.
- Ledger
- Hummingbird
- Northwind
- Meridian
- Fieldnote
- Harbourline
What you get
One binary, a folder of Markdown and nothing in the output that the reader has to download twice.
Rebuilds as you write
A watch run touches only the file you saved, so the page in the browser is never more than a moment behind the one on disk.
Your own layouts
Drop a template in layouts/ and atlas picks it up. Nothing to register and nothing to import.
Links checked first
Every internal link is followed before the output is written. A broken one stops the build instead of reaching a reader.
One command to deploy
Run atlas deploy and the output folder goes to the host named in the config. The URL comes back on the same line.
Nothing at runtime
No framework, no hydration, no tracking. The built site is HTML, CSS and whatever you put there yourself.
How it works
Three steps from an empty folder to a site people can read.
- Write the pages, one Markdown file each, in whatever folders suit you.
- Run the watch build and keep writing. The browser follows every save.
- Deploy. The output folder goes up and the address comes back.
[build]
out = "_site"
watch = true
drafts = false
[links]
check = true
ignore = ["mailto:", "tel:"]One file holds the settings
It sits at the root of the project and every key has a default. Leave the file out and you get the values above, so a new site starts with no configuration at all.
What a build tells you
Each run ends in three lines. They say what was made, what is broken and where it went.
182 pages in 1.94 seconds
Pages render in parallel, and a watch run reads only the file you saved.
Two links point at a page that moved
Both ask for /guide/old-path, left over from a rename. The build stops before anything is written.
Uploaded in nine seconds
Only the files that changed go up. The rest stay in the host's cache, where the reader already has them.
What people say
Three teams that moved a site over and kept writing.
We moved a hundred-page handbook across in an afternoon and deleted the old build.
The watch run is quick enough that I stopped reaching for the reload key.
Our designers edit the Markdown now, and nobody asks me to deploy on a Friday.
Numbers
Measured on the atlas documentation site, a thousand pages of Markdown, on a laptop.
Questions
The ones people ask before they install it.
Does atlas need Node?
Only to install it from npm. atlas itself is one binary, and a project needs nothing but a folder of Markdown beside it.
Can I keep my old addresses?
Yes. Front matter takes a permalink, and a redirects file maps anything that moved, so a link printed last year still lands.
What happens to images?
Files beside the Markdown are copied through as they are. atlas resizes the ones you ask it to and leaves the rest alone.
Does it hold up on a big site?
Pages render in parallel and a watch run rebuilds only what changed. A thousand pages take about two seconds.
Where does the output go?
Into _site, or wherever --out points. Nothing outside that folder is touched.
Write the first page tonight
Install atlas, point it at a folder, and read the site back in the browser a second later.