crofty

README

crofty

Write Markdown; crofty builds it with Hugo and deploys it to a website you own on your own domain and accounts. It never talks to a server of ours — there isn't one. Deploys go straight to your Cloudflare account over its API, with no Node or Wrangler in the loop.

crofty is a plain CLI you can run yourself, but it's built so your AI can run it for you: a person installs it and does the first setup, then an assistant takes over. If you work that way, point your assistant at crofty agent first — it prints crofty's whole command surface (every command with its flags and examples, the usual workflow, and the machine-readable state to read — config, features, validate and doctor all take --json) in one shot, with no project needed. From there it can drive everything below.

Install

macOS (Homebrew):

brew install ShiroDoromoto/crofty/crofty

Windows (Scoop):

scoop bucket add crofty https://github.com/ShiroDoromoto/scoop-crofty
scoop install crofty

Linux (.deb / .rpm from the releases page):

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo dpkg -i crofty_*_linux_amd64.deb
# Fedora/RHEL
sudo rpm -i crofty_*_linux_amd64.rpm

crofty wraps Hugo at runtime for build and preview. On macOS and Windows both installers pull it in for you — Homebrew as a formula dependency, Scoop as a manifest dependency (hugo-extended from the main bucket). On Linux the .deb/.rpm only recommends hugo (distro packages are often outdated or not the extended build), so install hugo-extended yourself — crofty build / crofty preview will tell you if it's missing from your PATH.

Quick start

First, start a project (a website you own) — pick where it goes:

crofty init          # asks for a name, then creates it under ~/Documents/Crofty/
crofty init <name>   # a bare name lands in ~/Documents/Crofty/<name>
crofty init .        # use the current folder (a path or absolute dir works too)

Then build and publish it:

cd <the path it prints>   # crofty init prints where it created the site
crofty preview     # see it in a browser — no account needed
crofty connect     # save your Cloudflare API token (to your keychain)
crofty deploy      # build the current site and publish it to your own Cloudflare Pages

crofty init scaffolds a standard Hugo project plus a .crofty/ folder:

your-site/
├── hugo.yaml            # standard Hugo config (baseURL, title, …)
├── .crofty/
│   └── config.json      # crofty settings (deploy target) — never your content, no secrets
└── content/
    ├── _index.md        # your home page, in Markdown
    └── posts/
        └── welcome/
            └── index.md # a sample post to edit or delete

To change settings later, run crofty init inside the project (or point it at one). It prompts for an optional support link; analytics and the site title are settings you (or your AI) edit directly in hugo.yaml / data/profile.yml — it shows where, and never rewrites them for you. The build output is a plain Hugo project, so you can take it and run hugo yourself without this tool.

More than a blog

The sample project starts as a blog (content/posts/), but a crofty site is a whole Hugo site — the homepage bits an author rarely escapes are pages too. Two kinds, both drawn by the same frozen theme:

• Fixed pages you maintain — about, contact, access, legal — are a Markdown file at content/<slug>/index.md.
• Collections that grow like the blog — a gallery, a shop, a discography — are a section folder: an _index.md plus one folder per item.

Put any of them in the top navigation through hugo.yaml's menu.main (crofty prints the lines to paste; it never rewrites hugo.yaml). Contact and commerce stay external on a static site — embed a form (Formspree, Tally) or link out to a checkout (Stripe, BOOTH). crofty agent prints these recipes in full: the two page kinds, the menu snippet, and where the external pieces go.

Commands

crofty init       # create a new project (or re-run to configure an existing one)
crofty agent      # print the whole command surface for an AI to read first
crofty features   # list what crofty can do and how to turn each on
crofty config     # show this project's current configuration
crofty add        # turn on a capability (mermaid, abc, highlight, raw-html, analytics)
crofty lang       # add or list the languages your site is written in
crofty preview    # see your site in a browser (local, no account)
crofty build      # render the site to ./dist with Hugo (to inspect it)
crofty connect    # save the Cloudflare API token used to deploy
crofty deploy     # build the current site and publish it to Cloudflare Pages
crofty analytics  # read your traffic (GA4) and search performance (Search Console)
crofty validate   # check content against the crofty spec (v0)
crofty doctor     # check the built site against the output contract
crofty share      # print a ready-to-post fragment (text + link) for any SNS
crofty theme      # bring the theme onto disk to customize (eject tokens or full)
crofty reset      # remove saved credentials (keychain) and state

crofty validate [path ...] (default ./content) reports, in field order, what does not match the spec and how to fix it — in plain language you can act on by hand or hand to any assistant. It is side-effect-free; --json emits the same findings as structured output for tools. It exits non-zero when any blocking error is found.

crofty share <post> composes a ready-to-post fragment — the title, a summary, and a link back to your site — for each channel in the post's crofty.targets (or --to). The body is never included: the summary and link are all you give away, so readers come to your site for the rest. It touches no credentials and posts nothing — it prints the text (and, where a platform has one, a pre-filled compose link) for you or your agent to paste or open. --json emits the same fragments as structured output; --plain prints just the text and link.

crofty analytics reads your own traffic from the command line: GA4 (who visited, what they read) and Search Console (search queries, pages, sitemaps), as a plain table or --json for an assistant. It uses your own Google service-account key, kept in your OS keychain, and talks to Google's APIs directly — there is no server of ours in between. Set the property in hugo.yaml (params.crofty.analytics); crofty analytics status walks you through the one-time setup and tells you the next missing step.

A draft stays off your published site: add draft: true to a post's frontmatter, or give it a future date to schedule it ahead. crofty build lists any posts it leaves out, so nothing disappears silently.

crofty eject (convert to a plain Hugo project) is planned for a later milestone.

The bundled theme is static and ships no JavaScript or trackers.

Build from source

Requires Go 1.25+ (and Hugo to run it).

go build -o crofty .

License

See LICENSE.

Documentation

Overview

Command crofty turns Markdown into a website you build and deploy to your own accounts. It wraps Hugo to build and deploys straight to your Cloudflare account over its API (no Node or Wrangler), and never talks to a server of ours — there isn't one.