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🚀 Getting Started with Blognami

Welcome aboard! 🎉 Blognami is an open-source blogging platform built on its own full-stack web framework — Sintra. This guide will walk you from nothing installed to your first post live in just a few minutes.

You’ll learn:

  • How to set up Blognami on your machine
  • How to sign in as an admin
  • How to create and edit posts
  • A quick intro to Sintra, the framework behind it

🖐 Hi, I’m Jody Salt, the creator of Blognami — and I’m genuinely excited you’re here. This project is still in its early days, so you’re getting in on the ground floor. Let’s build something great together.

🛠 Step 1 — Check Your Setup

Before we touch the keyboard, make sure you have:

  • Node.js version 18 or higher

  • A Unix-compatible environment, such as:

    • Linux ✅
    • macOS ✅
    • Windows (via Windows Subsystem for Linux — WSL) ✅

💡 Pro Tip: Even if you’re on Windows, installing WSL makes life much easier for modern web development.

📦 Step 2 — Create Your First Project

We’re going to let Sintra (Blognami’s command-line sidekick) handle all the setup.

In your terminal, run:

npx sintra generate-project --name foo --with blognami
cd foo
npx sintra initialize-database
npx sintra start-server

Then, open your browser and visit:

http://127.0.0.1:3000/

🎉 Boom — your first Blognami site is live! To stop the server, press Ctrl+C.

📝 Why This Matters: These commands don’t just create files — they give you a fully functional app, database, and server in one shot, so you can focus on features instead of setup headaches.

🔍 Step 3 — What Just Happened?

In the past 30 seconds, you:

  1. Generated a brand-new Blognami project
  2. Initialized a fresh SQLite database
  3. Started a local development server

💡 Pro Tip: SQLite is perfect for development — no setup, zero configuration. For production, you can swap it for a heavier-duty database later.

🔑 Step 4 — Sign In as Admin

When you created the project, Blognami automatically seeded it with an admin account (defined in lib/commands/seed_database.js):

Email: [email protected]
Password: none (Blognami is passwordless ✨)

Here’s how to log in:

  1. Click Sign in in the navbar
  2. Enter [email protected]
  3. Tick the terms checkbox
  4. Click Next

Sign in

You’ll be prompted for a one-time password (OTP). Check your terminal — Blognami “emails” it right there:

One time password email

Enter the code, click Next, and… you’re in. 🎯

📝 Why This Matters: Passwordless login means fewer security risks (no password database to hack) and a smoother sign-in experience.

📝 Step 5 — Add Your First Blog Post

You’re now logged in as the boss — let’s make something.

  1. In the navbar, click Add > Post
  2. Enter a title (e.g., Hello World)
  3. Click Add post

Add post

This creates your post shell. To add content, click Edit.

Edit Hello World post body

✍️ The Markdown Editor

You’ll see a split-screen Markdown editor:

Split-screen markdown editor

  • Left: Write in Markdown
  • Right: Live preview

When you’re happy with your post, close the editor and click Save Changes.

💡 Pro Tip: Markdown is fast, portable, and readable even without rendering — perfect for content you might want to version control.

If this were a live site, you could click Publish to make it public. Since this is just a test, feel free to explore other features — most are self-explanatory.

🔄 Step 6 — Reset If You Need To

Want to start fresh? Just run:

npx sintra reset-database

📝 Why This Matters: In early development, you’ll break things. Being able to instantly wipe and restart keeps you moving forward instead of debugging bad test data.

🧩 Step 7 — Meet Sintra

You’ve been using Sintra this whole time — it’s the CLI and framework powering Blognami.

Here’s the philosophy: Blognami and Sintra are symbiotic.

  • Blognami benefits from Sintra’s flexibility — you can customize and extend it endlessly
  • Sintra stays lean because Blognami makes sure every feature solves a real, tested problem

💡 Pro Tip: By building your app on Sintra, you’re also building on a framework that was born to run real-world projects, not just demo apps.

🌟 Where to Go Next

You’ve got a working Blognami app. Now let’s keep the momentum going:

📂 Check out the code

Both Blognami and Sintra are open source. Dive into the code, learn how it works, and maybe even make your first pull request. 👉 Visit the GitHub repository

⭐ Give it a star

If Blognami helped you or inspired you, please give it a star on GitHub. It’s a quick way to show support and helps more developers discover it.

💬 Share your thoughts

Have feedback? Found a bug? Got a feature idea? Open an issue or start a discussion in the GitHub repo. Your feedback will directly help shape the future of Blognami.

🚀 Get involved early

Blognami is still in its early days. This means your ideas, contributions, and experiments can have a huge impact — whether that’s code, docs, testing, or just trying it out and reporting back.

👋 Hi, I’m Jody Salt, the creator of Blognami. I’d be genuinely excited to see you get involved — even if it’s just to say hi or tell me what you built.

The journey is just beginning, and you’re invited. ✨