Italic

Publish your digital garden to the Atmosphere

Transform your Markdown notes or Obsidian Vault into blogs, wikis, and websites that you can publish to Bluesky and the web. Think in public, build your audience, own your data.

• Blog-aware: custom taxonomies, theming, archives, rss and more
• Obsidian-compatible: Wikilinks, backlinks, block references and support for Obsidian-flavored Markdown.
• ATProto-enabled: publish to Bluesky and ATProto, with support for bsky and standard.site records.

Features

• Markup
  • Github-flavored Markdown
  • Multiple formats: publish content from Markdown, HTML, and YAML files
  • Math (LaTeX/KaTeX): inline/display math for technical gardens
  • Components (shortcodes): define custom components you can use in your Markdown for YouTube embeds, UI widgets, and more.
  • Code fences with syntax highlighting
  • Callouts: info, warnings, etc.
• Digital gardens
  • Wikilinks: fuzzy link matching using the same algorithm as Obsidian
  • Backlinks: see everything that links back to a page.
  • Block references: deep link to headings and blocks with Obsidian-style purple links.
  • Hashtags: lifted up to tag taxonomy
  • Obsidian Markdown extensions: supports lots of long-tail Obsidian Markdown features.
  • Obsidian Vaults: seamlessly transform your Vault into a website.
• Blogs
  • Draft posts
  • Tags
  • Archives: paginated archival posts
  • RSS: syndicate your posts, including multiple custom feeds
  • Publish multiple blogs on the same site (custom collections)
• Content websites
  • Custom permalinks: customizable per-collection and per-page
  • Redirects
  • Custom taxonomies: organize posts by tag, category, artist, label, phase of the moon — no problem.
  • Custom collections: glob-match files to define custom page collections you can use in templates
  • Related pages: Surface related posts with a customizable algorithm
  • Page trees: organize pages into a tree for menus
  • Collection defaults: add custom metadata to groups of pages
  • Data files: bulk-add custom template data via the data/ folder
• Theming
  • Themes
  • Theme overrides
  • Tera templates: blazingly fast Jinja-like templates in Rust with support for template functions, filters, components, template extension, and more.
  • Lots of built-in custom filters and functions
• SEO
  • Social cards: automatically add metadata for Twitter Cards, Facebook Open Graph, schema.org and more.
  • sitemap.xml support
• Development
  • Built-in local dev server
  • Super-fast hot reload
• ATProto integration
  • PDS integration: publish and check your website's sync status
  • Bluesky microblogging
  • standard.site records

Install

cargo install italic

Needs Rust 1.95+. See Installing for the toolchain, PATH, and upgrade details.

Quick start

The fastest way to get started is to install the Italic skill and let your coding agent set up a site for you.

Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add gordonbrander/italic
/plugin install italic@italic

Codex:

$skill-installer install https://github.com/gordonbrander/italic/tree/main/.agents/skills/italic

Or, do it by hand:

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

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

italic build outputs plain static files to public/, ready for any host. The getting-started section of the skill covers all of this in more detail.

Documentation

The documentation is written agent-first: it is the reference material for the Italic agent skill, one small file per question, routed from the skill's lookup table. Humans are welcome too — start at SKILL.md, whose table lists every page in .agents/skills/italic/references/. Highlights:

• Recipe: notes + blog + tags + feed — end to end from a folder of Markdown
• Concepts — content model, the build pipeline
• Guides — wikilinks, related pages, collections, taxonomies, layouts, archives & feeds, themes, deployment, migration, and more
• Reference — CLI, configuration, frontmatter, template context, troubleshooting

License

AGPL — see LICENSE-AGPL.