Getting Started with Unloyd

If you’re looking for a clean, modern starting point for your documentation site or blog, Unloyd might be exactly what you need. This post walks through what Unloyd is, what’s included, and how to get it running locally in a few minutes.

What Is Unloyd?

Unloyd is an open-source template built on Astro 7 — a framework designed for content-heavy sites that need to be fast. It ships with a documentation system, a blog engine, static search, dark mode, SEO support, and a set of custom Markdown components out of the box.

The goal is simple: give you a solid foundation you can clone, customize, and deploy without having to wire everything up yourself.

What’s Included

Out of the box, Unloyd gives you:

• A documentation system with a sidebar, table of contents, and full-text search powered by Pagefind
• A blog with pagination, an activity archive, RSS feeds, and author profiles
• Custom directives for richer Markdown — callouts, steps, tabs, filetrees, accordions, cards, and more
• Dark mode with a built-in theme switcher
• SEO — Open Graph, Twitter Cards, JSON-LD structured data, sitemap, and robots.txt
• A contact form wired up to Formspree

Getting It Running

Clone the repo, install dependencies, and copy the example environment file:

git clone https://github.com/bimaakbar-dev/unloyd.git
cd unloyd
npm install
cp .env.example .env

Open .env and set your site URL:

PUBLIC_SITE_URL=http://localhost:4321

Then start the development server:

npm run dev

Open http://localhost:4321 and you should see the site running.

Customizing Your Site

Most customization happens in src/config/site.ts. Open it and update your site name, description, navigation, and footer links. No need to touch any component files.

export const SITE = {
  name: "My Site",
  tagline: "My tagline",
  description: "My site description.",
  // ...
};

For documentation pages, create .md files in src/content/docs/ with the right frontmatter. The sidebar order is controlled by src/config/docsNavigation.ts.

Deploying

Unloyd is a static site — it works with any static hosting platform. The recommended option is Cloudflare Pages:

That’s it. Cloudflare will build and serve your site automatically on every push.

What’s Next?

From here you can:

• Add your own content to src/content/docs/ and src/content/blog/
• Customize the theme in src/styles/global.css
• Explore the custom directives in the Components section
• Set up analytics and a contact form via environment variables

Unloyd is meant to get out of your way — the less time you spend on setup, the more time you have for the content that matters.