Star-Lite Docs

Getting Started

The Starlight documentation experience, powered by EmDash CMS. Edit docs visually in the browser — no MDX files, no Git commits, no rebuilds.

Get Started

Install Bun if you don't have it:

Terminal window
curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash

Then create your project:

Terminal window
bun create star-lite-docs

The CLI scaffolds your project and offers three deployment targets: Local, Docker, or Cloudflare Workers (with automatic D1/R2 provisioning and deploy).

Features

  • Starlight layout — collapsible sidebar, table of contents, Ctrl+K search, dark/light/auto theme
  • 14 block types — hero, tabs, cards, asides, steps, badges, file trees, icons, link buttons, code, images, and raw HTML
  • Zero config — one integration, no schema setup. First request seeds the pages collection, sidebar menu, and welcome page
  • Menu-driven sidebar — edit navigation from the admin UI, no rebuild needed
  • Expressive Code — syntax highlighting with bundled Night Owl themes
  • Copy Page MD — one-click clipboard export of any page as markdown

How It Works

  • Content is stored as Portable Text in the ec_pages table — the database is the source of truth.
  • The /[...slug] catch-all route looks up a published page by slug, preprocesses blocks (images, headings with TOC anchors, tables, and standard text blocks are all converted to docs.html), and renders via emdash's PortableText with Star-Lite's block components.
  • On first boot, the middleware runs applySeed to create the pages collection, docs-sidebar menu, and a welcome page. This is idempotent — existing data is never overwritten.
  • The toolbar Save button is injected client-side via a DOMContentLoaded handler that watches the emdash toolbar's status area with a MutationObserver.
  • Block components use data-sl-edit attributes for inline contenteditable editing and data-block-props for the block edit form.

Next steps