Canary

A hand-rolled, no-framework static site engine: a small TypeScript client runtime (real paths via the History API, nav population, content widgets) paired with a C# CLI that prerenders every route to real static HTML — crawlable by default, sitemap-friendly, GitHub Pages-friendly.

A "Canary site" is a directory holding a canary.json config plus markdown content and theme assets. canary build/canary serve work on that directory the same way for any site that adopts it — including this one: this documentation is itself a Canary site, built by the same canary build command a real project uses, from source you can read in docsite/ in the repo.

Where to start

• New to Canary? Start with Getting Started — scaffold a project, serve it locally, make your first edit.
• Already have a project and want a specific answer? Jump to Reference for canary.json and the CLI.
• Want the concepts, not just the commands? See Guide for render modes, widgets, the content toolchain, and publishing.
• Curious why Canary exists at all instead of reaching for an existing static site generator? See Why Canary.

Status

Pre-alpha. Canary is run from source today — build and run dotnet run --project src/Canary from a checkout. There's no published package yet (winget is the intended eventual distribution channel); see Reference → CLI for the commands as they exist right now.