cherry

<p align="center">
  <img src="assets/cherrybomb_text.png" alt="Cherrybomb" width="520">
</p>

<p align="center">
  <strong>A static site generator for hackers.</strong><br>
  Fast static pages · a proper blog · your developer story — with first-class support
  for the agents that help you build it.
</p>

<p align="center">
  <a href="https://cherrybomb.dev">cherrybomb.dev</a> ·
  <a href="DESIGN.md">Design</a> ·
  <a href="docs/adr/">ADRs</a> ·
  <a href="CHANGELOG.md">Changelog</a>
</p>

---


Cherrybomb is a modern take on [Octopress](http://octopress.org): your site is a repo,
publishing is a task, everything is hackable — without the part where upgrading the
framework ruins your week. The engine is Elixir, the CLI is `cherry`, and the output
is plain HTML you can host anywhere.

## Install


One line, no toolchain:

```sh

curl -fsSL https://cherrybomb.dev/install.sh | sh   # macOS / Linux

irm https://cherrybomb.dev/install.ps1 | iex        # Windows

```


Upgrading is `cherry upgrade`. Elixir developers can skip the binary and use Cherry
as a mix dependency instead — every `cherry <verb>` below is also `mix cherry.<verb>`,
flag for flag.

## Quickstart


```sh

cherry new mysite && cd mysite

cherry gen.post "Hello, world"

cherry serve                      # live-reloading dev server

cherry build                      # → _site/, plain files, deploy anywhere

cherry gen.action                 # GitHub Pages workflow, done

```


## What you get


**Fast static pages.** Prerendered HTML, zero JavaScript by default. Enhancements
(theme toggle, search) are tiny islands that fail soft.

**A blog that behaves.** Markdown + YAML frontmatter, validated against a schema at
build time — errors name the file and the field. Tags, drafts, future posts, Atom +
JSON feeds, sitemap, canonical URLs, OpenGraph and JSON-LD, all default-on.

**A developer story, not a résumé.** The portfolio is data: positions, projects,
talks, open source — rendered as a timeline, cross-linked with your blog through one
shared tag taxonomy. The "Elixir" page shows your jobs, projects, *and* every post
you've written about it.

**Themes you can actually swap.** Themes implement a versioned contract (templates +
design tokens), so switching is one config line. Customization is a ladder — config →
tokens → CSS → eject a template — and ejects record provenance, so theme upgrades
three-way-merge instead of silently stranding your copies.

**Light and dark, properly.** Token-driven, honors system preference, manual toggle
wins, no flash of the wrong theme — and code blocks follow along at zero JS cost.

**Agents are users too.** Every command takes `--json` and returns structured
results. `cherry check` verifies links, SEO, and schemas with machine-readable
diagnostics. `cherry schema posts --json` tells an agent exactly what valid
frontmatter is *before* it writes. New sites ship an `AGENTS.md`. Published sites
emit `llms.txt` and a markdown mirror of every page — readable without scraping.

**Host anywhere.** `_site/` is plain files. GitHub Pages is first-class (generated
Actions workflow, correct base-path handling for project pages, CNAME, `.nojekyll`)
— Netlify, Cloudflare, S3, or rsync work just as well.

## Hack it


A Cherry site is a thin Elixir project depending on the `cherry` package — so a
"plugin" is just a module in your repo hooking a pipeline stage, and a framework
upgrade is a version bump. Binary-mode sites (no `mix.exs`) extend via `extensions/*.exs`
scripts and can graduate to a full mix project by adding one file.

Builds are deterministic by contract: same input, byte-identical output.

## Status


**Pre-0.1 — this README is the north star, not the current state.** Cherry is being
built in the open, README-first: [DESIGN.md](DESIGN.md) is the constitution,
[docs/adr/](docs/adr/) records the decisions, and [DO_NEXT.md](DO_NEXT.md) is the
build order. The first dogfood targets are [holsee's site](https://github.com/holsee/holsee.github.io)
(migrating off Octopress, full circle) and [cherrybomb.dev](https://cherrybomb.dev)
itself.

## License


Dual-licensed under [MIT](LICENSE-MIT) or [Apache 2.0](LICENSE-APACHE) — your choice.
Contributions are accepted under the same dual license.