Kite

Write in Markdown. Manage content in your browser. Publish on your terms.

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Kite is an open-source publishing platform that gives you the writing experience of a CMS and the portability of a static site generator. It is a single Go binary with the admin studio built in.

• A studio in your browser. A visual editor that reads and writes Markdown, with the source one click away, image uploads, tags, categories, and drafts.
• Files that stay yours. Content is plain Markdown on disk. Saving rewrites only what changed and keeps your key order and comments, so editing a title is a one-line git diff.
• Publish your way. Export static pages for any host, run the site on your own server, or commit and push through Git.
• Nothing else to install. The studio, a default theme with light and dark modes, and the SQLite driver are compiled into the binary.
• Plugins when you want them. Comments, analytics, search, and math come as official plugins you install and switch on in the studio. A plugin adds code to pages, or runs WebAssembly in a sandbox while the site builds.

Kite is in early development: 0.1 is its first release, and things may still change from one version to the next.

How it works

Your Markdown files are the source of truth. The studio edits them in place, and the index Kite keeps under .kite/ is only a cache: delete it, rebuild, and the same data comes back. The same files become static pages with kite build, a live site with kite run, or a Git commit with kite publish.

Install and start

Download (recommended)

Download the archive for your system from the latest release, unpack it, and put kite somewhere on your PATH. Then start a site in an empty folder:

mkdir blog
cd blog
kite run

The browser opens on a page that asks what the site is called and what your name is, which the site shows as its author; answer it and you are in the studio. kite init asks the same questions in the terminal instead. Next time, run kite run from the blog folder.

Coming from another generator? A Hugo site's content opens where it is, and kite import hexo ../old-blog blog brings a Hexo site's into a new one, old addresses included; see Moving from Hugo and Moving from Hexo.

On macOS, a downloaded program is held back the first time it runs; xattr -d com.apple.quarantine kite lets it through. Every archive can be checked against checksums.txt in the release.

Docker

To run the site on a server, with Docker installed:

docker run -d --name kite --restart unless-stopped -p 127.0.0.1:1717:1717 -v kite-data:/data ghcr.io/kite-plus/kite:latest

Open the studio and follow the setup steps to name your site and create an admin account. Your site is at localhost:1717.

Content and your account are stored in the kite-data volume. To stop or restart:

docker stop kite
docker start kite

From source

Requires Git, Make, Go 1.26.4+, Node.js 22.19.0, and pnpm 10.11.1. The build uses the Go toolchain pinned by the project.

git clone https://github.com/kite-plus/kite.git
cd kite
make web
make install

Add Go's binary installation directory (usually ~/go/bin) to your PATH, then start a site as above. To build the Docker image yourself instead, run docker build -t kite . in the clone.

Write and manage

1. Create a post or page in the studio. Write in the visual editor or switch to Markdown source.
2. Drop in images and set categories, tags, and a URL slug. Keep unfinished work as a draft; clear the draft setting and save when ready.
3. Update your site's name, URL, and language in Settings, and customize its appearance in Theme.

Local kite run includes drafts for preview. Normal serving and static builds exclude them.

Publish your site

Export static pages: Open Deploy in the studio and export the site as a zip, then upload what is in it to any static host. From the command line, kite build writes the same files to public/. With Docker:

docker exec kite kite build
docker cp kite:/data/public ./public

Run on a server: Follow the deployment guide to configure your site domain and serve it over HTTPS.

Publish through Git: With a Git remote configured for your local site, run kite publish --all --push to commit and push content. Automatic deployment also needs a hosting workflow.

Roadmap

• Done: static builds, live serving, the browser studio, and Git publishing (M0–M4), and the first version of WebAssembly plugins (M8), released as 0.1.
• Next: a public theme contract, kite.lock with the kitew wrapper, and a dynamic mode backed by SQLite (M5–M7).

The reference guide lists every milestone, and the roadmap tracks progress item by item.

Contributing

• Report a bug or share an idea: open an issue with your version, environment, and steps to reproduce.
• Send a change: read the contributing notes and run make check before you open a pull request. If a change conflicts with the design documents, update the documents first.

More

• Reference guide: accounts, themes, plugins, configuration, deployment, and development.
• Design documents: architecture, the theme system, and the plugin system, written in Chinese.
• Apache License 2.0