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Installation

Meet Elegant​

Elegant is a utility-first CMS framework for rapidly building expressive and elegant static content web applications. A CMS framework provides a structure and a starting point for creating a beautiful application, blog, or documentation website.

Why Elegant?​

There are a variety of tools and frameworks available to you when building a frontend application. However, we believe Elegant is the best choice for building amazing, and elegant web applications.

Your First Elegant Project​

Before creating your first Elegant project, you should ensure that your local machine has Node and NPM installed.

The next step is to intall the Elegant CLI tool via npm.

npm install elegant-cli --save-dev

After you have installed the Elegant CLI tool, you may create a new Elegant documentation project via the NPM npx elegant-docs-init command:

npx elegant-docs-init

After the project has been created, install the required Node packages, and start Elegant's local development server using npm:

npm install

npm run start

Once you have started the Elegant development server, your application will be accessible in your web browser at http://localhost:3000/docs.

To stop the Elegant development server, press the ctrl and c keys together in the terminal:

ctrl + c

Initial Configuration​

Elegant needs almost no additional configuration out of the box. You are free to get started developing!

Environment Based Configuration​

Since many of Elegant's configuration option values may vary depending on whether your application is running on your local machine or on a production web server, many important configuration values are defined using the .env file that exists at the root of your application.

Your .env file should not be committed to your application's source control, since each developer / server using your application could require a different environment configuration. Furthermore, this would be a security risk in the event an intruder gains access to your source control repository, since any sensitive credentials would get exposed.

Note
For more information about the .env file and environment based configuration, check out the full configuration documentation.