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A quick intro to Harold JS

Harold (create-harold-app) is a simple tool for creating static websites and blogs from ready-to-use templates. It is based on familiar Handlebars, Markdown, and SCSS, so it is easy to start with. Markdown parsing is powered by unified.

What can you do with it?

With Harold and static hosting services such as GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, or Vercel, you can quickly build blogs, documentation sites, landing pages, and small to medium websites. The ready-to-use templates include responsive layouts and a search experience based on Lunr and indexed post content.

This whole website is built using Harold.

Adjust styles, pages, post layouts, and frontend JavaScript logic

You can change the generated project in the src directory. Harold compiles everything into the build directory, where you’ll find a ready-to-deploy static site.

When to use it

  • when you want to build a static website or blog from a ready template
  • when you want template-level search without wiring it from scratch
  • when you want to build a small or medium site
  • when you know how to use the Handlebars template system

When not to use it

  • when you want to build a large project that needs a mature framework ecosystem
  • when you don't want to use SCSS (you can still write standard CSS in .scss files)
  • when you need custom build pipelines or plugin systems

Let's start here!

Templates demos

Some links