create-cancia

Scaffold an Astro + React site whose client can edit it — no admin panel, no separate server, no copy-pasting between a dashboard and the page.

pnpm create cancia my-client            # single language (the default)
pnpm create cancia my-client --i18n     # + Astro i18n routing

cd my-client
pnpm install
pnpm dev

Click the pencil, bottom right. No database, no token and no .env are needed to start — the page renders its own text until something is stored.

What you get

An Astro site with React wired for islands, Tailwind v4, and Cancia configured the way a client project actually wants it: one SQLite file for content, a deploy hook for publishing, and a page that is already editable.

The generated AGENTS.md is the authoring contract — read it before adding pages. The short version:

<h1>The quiet work of becoming.</h1>

That is all a page needs. Run the MCP's cancia_onboard and the agent adds data-cms="index.title"; you never write a key, an import, or a t() call. The markup is also the fallback, so an empty database renders the page exactly as written — which is what makes it safe to annotate a site that is already live.

The two rules worth knowing up front

Content lives in .astro; React is for interactivity. A hydrated island re-renders on mount and would overwrite whatever the editor wrote. Editable text belongs in .astro and reaches a component as props or children.

Repeating content should be a list, not repeated markup. Three testimonials in a const array can be edited but never added to. cancia_apply_list converts it and gives the client add / delete / reorder.

Before you deploy

Read src/lib/cms.ts. There is one build-environment detail — a static build cannot see a database on a runtime volume — that silently reverts every publish if it is wrong, with no error anywhere.