Getting started

This guide covers creating a minista v5 project and displaying your first page. The examples use npm and TypeScript, adding features one at a time to a minimal setup. The same setup works with JavaScript by omitting type annotations.

To ask an AI agent to build your site, continue to Building with agents.

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• Scaffold a project
• Edit the first page
• Minimal project and build output
• Manual installation
• Build and preview

Prerequisites

minista v5 supports the following versions.

Check that Node.js and npm are available in your terminal.

node --version
npm --version

Scaffold a project

Use minimal-ts to follow this guide in order. It starts with a minimal setup without layouts or styles.

npm create minista@latest my-minista-project -- --template minimal-ts
cd my-minista-project
npm install
npm run dev

Open the displayed local URL in your browser. Stop the development server with Ctrl + C.

If you omit the template, follow the prompts to choose a setup and language.

Edit the first page

For a TypeScript template, open and edit src/pages/index.tsx. For JavaScript, use index.jsx.

export default function Page() {
  return (
    <>
      <h1>Hello, minista!</h1>
      <p>This is the first static page.</p>
    </>
  )
}

Saving reflects changes in the development server. Pages are written as React components, but displaying them does not require React to run in the browser.

Minimal project and build output

The main files in minimal-ts are:

Development files such as AGENTS.md are omitted here.

my-minista-project/
├── src/
│   └── pages/
│       └── index.tsx
├── package.json
├── tsconfig.json
└── vite.config.ts

There is no layout, CSS, or browser JavaScript yet. Building the page initially generates a single HTML file.

dist/
└── index.html

The following guide pages add files and settings to build pages, shared layouts, assets, and interactive UI in order. Each structure diagram shows the parts relevant to its explanation.

Manual installation

To start without a template, run the following in an empty directory.

npm init -y
npm pkg set type=module
npm install --save-dev minista@^5 vite@^8.1 react@^19 react-dom@^19

Add scripts to package.json.

{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "minista",
    "build": "minista build",
    "preview": "minista preview",
    "check": "minista check"
  }
}

Create a configuration file at the project root and add pluginSsg(), which is required for static HTML output. Templates already include this configuration.

import { defineConfig, pluginSsg } from "minista"

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [pluginSsg()],
})

Create src/pages/index.jsx with the same component as the earlier page example, then start with npm run dev. See Configuration to add TypeScript to a manual setup.

Build and preview

npm run build
npm run preview

Static HTML and assets are generated in dist/. Publish the contents of this directory.

Next, Building with agents explains how to request a site. To develop it yourself, continue to Project structure.

After reviewing Configuration and Build and deploy, add pages starting with File-based routing. Each page covers one feature, so you can also start with the features you need.