hadley

0.5.1 is the latest release. The changelog names what it leaves open.

Just write. Own your site. For people who write — authors, bloggers, anyone with a site of their own — who would rather write than tinker.

hadley is a static site generator with an editor right on the page, every version of your pages kept without Git, and a comments service of its own: one program on your machine, open source, free, with no account and no tracking.

Just write.

• An editor on the page: in hadley dev, switch on edit mode, double-click a block and write; the Markdown stays in its file.
• Versions without Git: each page keeps its versions, whoever changed it (you, another editor, an agent); compare them word by word, undo, restore.
• Comments of your own: visitors write without an account and without a captcha service; you approve them on your own machine, and they become part of the article. hadley dev fetches the service the first time.
• Front matter in your language: a field may have other names in config.lima, in any language and gendered — titel:, größe:, 題名:, autor:in:.
• Everything else included: search, several languages as one site, pictures in the widths the theme asks for (AI-generated ones labelled from their metadata), drawings the theme colours, notes beside articles, a feed, a sitemap, og images, and two themes to start from — hems for writing, punch for a personal site — which become the site's own.

Bring your AI. If you want.

• Small enough to read whole: an agent can read all of hadley's documentation, Markanto and Lima included: about 26,000 tokens. Given only that, an agent did five everyday tasks on a new site in under four minutes (how it was measured).
• A guide for your agent: every new site gets an AGENTS.md that tells an agent which documentation to read for what; CLAUDE.md imports it for Claude Code.
• Ready for language models: every site publishes llms.txt, with its pages as Markdown if you like.
• An agent with a safety net: the chat beside the page brings Claude Code or Codex. Before it writes a file, runs a command or reaches the network, it asks you; every change it makes to a page is a version you can take back. What you give it goes to its provider.

Own your site.

• Open: hadley and its own packages are ISC-licensed. Your pages are files in folders, in formats with a public specification.
• Free: no paid tier, no plugins to buy. A small server for the comments costs about an espresso a month, and it carries several sites.
• Private: the themes load nothing from other servers and set no cookies; photos lose their location and camera data by default; the server has no editor and no login.
• Content is untrusted: what a page says is written escaped, and cannot make hadley read or write outside the site.

Built to be understood as a whole: content is written in Markanto, Markdown as you know it with a few things more; metadata in Lima, the part of YAML that front matter needs; templates in galley, and quad formats the HTML. Vite, sharp, Shiki and Pagefind do what they do best.

Quick start

hadley is one program, and it needs nothing else installed. On Windows, download it from the releases. With Node.js 24 or later, npm install --global @mkorun/hadley installs the package instead.

curl -fsSL https://hadley.sh/install.sh | sh
hadley init my-site                   # hems with its sample blog; --theme punch for a personal site
cd my-site
hadley dev                            # http://localhost:8000
hadley deploy --build                 # the site to publish, in .hadley/publish/

Getting started walks through it, from the first page to the server.

Documentation

Getting started	install, a new site, the first page, publishing
Command line	every command and option
A site	its folders: content, bundles, collections, languages, the states of a page
config.lima	everything a site configures
Content	front matter and Markanto as hadley reads them
Themes	templates, what they read, settings; hems and punch
Deploying	the publish build and a server for it
Dev server	working on a site, and the editor in the browser
Comments · Highlighting · Platforms	the rest

Questions and help

hadley is made by one person, Michael Kortstiege. If you are trying it, I am glad to help, and no question is too small: ask in Discussions, where the answer helps others too, or write to [email protected], in English or German. Answers may take a few days.

Contributing

CONTRIBUTING.md says how to work on hadley, SECURITY.md how to report a vulnerability. Everyone taking part follows the code of conduct.

License

ISC. The fonts of the themes are under the SIL Open Font License; their files name them.