Quickstart

From nothing to a published post in five steps. Budget about ten minutes.

Before you start: Tovu is at MVP. It runs on your own machine — there is no signup and no hosted plan. Everything below happens locally, and everything you create stays in a folder you control.

1

Create a site

A Tovu site is a directory. This command makes one and fills it with a working database, a starter theme, and some example content:

tovu init my-site

You now have a complete site on disk. Nothing has been uploaded anywhere.

2

Start it

From inside the folder you just created:

cd my-site tovu serve

Tovu prints two addresses — one for your public site, one for the admin. Open the admin one.

3

Write something

Go to Posts and click New. You get a normal rich-text editor — headings, lists, links, images, code blocks. Give it a title and write a few paragraphs.

Your work saves as a draft as you go. A draft is a row in the database on your disk; it has not left your machine.

4

Publish it

Switch the status from Draft to Published and save. Reload your public site — the post is there, rendered by whichever theme is active.

Publishing in Tovu means "visible on the site this Tovu is serving." It does not push anything to the internet.

5

Make it yours

Two things to try next. In Themes, switch to a different theme and watch the same content re-render — content and presentation are genuinely separate here.

Then open the assistant and ask it to do something: "write me an About page" or "make the headings on the homepage bigger." It works through a reviewed catalog of tools, so it can only take actions Tovu deliberately allows.

Where to next

The concepts behind what you just did, and how to reshape it.