Quickstart

The best way to get started with Lektor is to use the quickstart command to let Lektor generate a basic project layout for you. This requires the use of the command line client which is the recommended way to do development until the website is ready for end user management.

If you do not have the lektor command line executable available yet just consult the Installation section of the documentation.

Creating a New Project

To create a new project open a terminal and navigate to the preferred location of your project. Then execute the quickstart command to create a new project:

$ lektor quickstart

This will ask you a few questions and then create a new Lektor project with some basic configuration for you.

Screencast

If you want a video walkthrough you can have a look at the screencast which explains the quickstart project a bit:

Running your Project

Now that you have a project you can run it. As a developer the easiest way to do that is to use the server which runs the project on your local machine as if it was a dynamic website.

All you have to do is to enter your project directory and run it:

$ cd yourproject
$ lektor server

This will automatically start the server and you can navigate to localhost:5000 to open the project.

You can keep the server running, it will automatically rebuild your files as they change.

Accessing the Admin

While the development server is running you can use the built-in admin interface. It can be accessed by clicking on the pencil symbol on a page or by manually navigating to /admin/.

Building

When you want to build the website for distribution you can make Lektor build everything into static files. In fact, that's already happening in the background while the development server is running. If you want to trigger a build you can use the build command. By default it builds into a lektor cache directory.

$ lektor build

You can also explicitly provide a path if you are not satisfied with the default directory. To see where this directory is you can use the project-info command:

$ lektor project-info --output-path
/Users/john/.../build-cache/6fdaeecab78d6aa99f86f586ab15da06

All your generated files will end up in that folder for easy publishing.

Next Steps

Now that you have done that, you might be interested in diving deeper into Lektor. These might be good next steps:

• The Guides which cover common setups.
• The Deployment Documentation which shows how to deploy a website to production.
• Data Modelling for everything about how to model your data.