create-pilcrow

The scaffolder for Pilcrow — a static blog generator that typesets your posts at build time. Markdown in, typeset HTML out. Zero JavaScript at the reader.

Quick start

npx create-pilcrow my-blog
cd my-blog
bun install
bun run dev

Open http://localhost:4321. Edit src/content/posts/example.md to write your first post. Run bun run build to produce typeset HTML in dist/. Push to GitHub and Cloudflare Pages auto-deploys on every commit.

What you get

A complete Astro project, pre-configured with the Pilcrow engine. Every post is set in Fraunces on a 65-character measure, with a drop cap on the opening paragraph, Tufte-style margin notes via :::sidenote directives, footnotes in GFM syntax, pull quotes via :::pullquote, and en-gb hyphenation with an orphan guard. The image pipeline converts your photographs to AVIF and WebP at three breakpoints, with thumbhash placeholders baked in at build time. Per-post OG cards are generated in Fraunces during the build. An RSS feed and sitemap come included. None of this requires a line of JavaScript running at the reader.

Requirements

• Bun (>=1.0) for the build. Install.
• Node.js (>=18.17.1) — the CLI itself runs on Node and is zero-dep.

The build runs Playwright headless Chromium to measure each paragraph at its actual rendered column width before committing the line breaks. On first install, Playwright downloads Chromium (~170 MB). Subsequent builds reuse the cached browser.

Documentation

Full documentation at pilcrow.page.

Licence

MIT.

Pilcrow is built on pretext by @chenglou.