Guide ​

Aplós is a user-friendly template for Vitepress that allows you to quickly set up and customize your website. In just a few simple steps, you can configure the template to match your preferences. Let's walk through the process:

Initialization ​

1. Aplós provides a convenient template that you can use to kickstart your project. To begin, click on the following link to initialize a repository with the Aplós template: Initialize Aplós Template.

2. After initializing, you have two options:

   • Clone the repository to edit the project locally: git clone https://github.com/*your_username*/aplos
   • Use GitHub Codespaces to edit the project online: GitHub Codespaces

   Make sure to replace your_username with your GitHub username.

3. Navigate to the /content/ and /.vitepress/ folders. Locate the config.mts file for further customization.

Package ​

To get started, follow these steps:

1. Install the Aplós package by running the following command in your terminal:

npm install aplos

2. After installing the package, in your project directory, create a folder named theme inside the .vitepress folder. Then, create a index.ts file inside the theme folder. This file will contain the following code:

import Aplos from "aplos/Layout.vue";
import type { Theme } from "vitepress";
import "aplos";

export default {
  Layout: Aplos,
} satisfies Theme;

With Articles or without Articles ​

Aplós offers two versions: one with configuration for articles (blogs) and one without. To choose the version that suits your needs, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the index.ts file inside /.vitepress/theme/ folder that we created earlier, after that change the import of the Layout.vue file to either Layout.vue or minimal/Layout.vue, and where you see import "aplos" change to import "aplos/minimal".

That will disable all the article (blog) related layouts.

With Articles ​

If you want to use the article configuration, you can check the provided guide below:

Customizing Configuration ​

You can edit the config.mts file to tailor the template to your needs. I've made an page that explains how to do that.

Start Writing ​

With the configuration set up, you can now start creating and editing your files. Utilize the content folder to add new pages. (if you used the template, you already have a content folder with some example pages)

Miscellaneous ​

Some additional guides and tips to help you get the most out of Aplós:

Articles (Blogs) ​

Setting up articles/a blog in Aplos is a breeze. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Create a folder named how ever you like in your project directory.
2. Inside the newly created folder, create an index.md file and set its layout to article-list.
3. Write your desired content in the index.md file.
4. Create a folder named posts inside the folder.
5. Inside the posts folder, create individual articles as separate Markdown files.
6. At the beginning of each article file, include the following frontmatter:

---
layout: article
title: Ipsum
author:
  - Gabriel Cozma
description: Why Ipsum is the best.
date: 2024-03-10T21:33:00+02:00
prev: First Blog
next: Lorem
tags:
  - demo
  - ipsum
  - example
---

Comments ​

Aplós supports two comment systems: Giscus and ActivityPub posts. To enable one of them, follow these steps:

• If you want Giscus: inside your posts/articles, add the following inside frontmatter:

comments: giscus

You also need to configure Giscus in the config.mts file. You can refer to the Edit Configuration page for more information.

Multiple Authors ​

If you have multiple authors for your articles, you can add them in the frontmatter like this:

author:
  - Gabriel Cozma
  - John Doe

It's as simple as that! You can add as many authors as you want.

General Styling ​

Using Aplós, you can customise the appearance of your content with various styling options. The .vitepress/theme/index.ts file allows importing additional files, including CSS or SCSS files, to apply custom styles to your project.

For example, to import a CSS file, you can add such a line to the index.ts file:

import "./overwrite.css";

Inside the overwrite.css file, you can add custom styles to modify the appearance of your content, or even adding custom components.

Chaning the Content Width ​

You can modify the width of the content in Aplós by changing the --content-width variable in the :root selector. For example, to set the content width to 50rem, add the following CSS to your project:

:root {
  --content-width: 50rem;
}

Deployment ​

To deploy your website, you can refer to the Guide made by VitePress. In the case that there isn't an examaple for your hosting provider, you can follow the steps below:

Codeberg ​

In the case of you wanting to host your website on Codeberg, it's actually not that hard:

Workflow ​

If you have access to Codeberg CI take advantage of the straightforward workflow I've created. This workflow automates the process of building your website whenever you make a push, deploying the deployment of your changes:

# Exclude page pipeline to be run on "pages" branch
when:
  branch:
    exclude: pages

steps:
  # Build vitepress static files
  build:
    image: alpine
    commands:
      - apk add --no-cache -X http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing pnpm git
      - pnpm install
      - pnpm run content:build
    when:
      event: [pull_request, push]

  publish:
    image: bitnami/git
    # Must be set in Woodpecker configuration
    secrets: [mail, codeberg_token]
    commands:
      - git config --global user.email $MAIL
      - git config --global user.name "Woodpecker CI"
      - git clone -b pages https://$CODEBERG_TOKEN@codeberg.org/$CI_REPO.git source-code
      - rm -r source-code/*
      - cp -ar ./content/.vitepress/dist/* source-code/
      - cd source-code
      - git add --all
      - git commit -m "Woodpecker CI ${CI_COMMIT_SHA} [SKIP CI]"
      - git push

    when:
      event: push

To seamlessly integrate with your CI process, simply configure two essential secrets in your CI Settings:

1. mail: This secret should contain the email associated with your account.
2. codeberg_token: This secret should store a token from your account, equipped with read and write access for your repositories.

Using an package ​

If you want to optout from using a workflow or don't want to make a request: There is actually a really simple and nice NPM package that helps you deploy your project to Codeberg. The package is called codeberg-pages you can install by running:

npm install codeberg-pages

Then, make a script to run the script:

(...)
  "scripts": {
    (...)
    "content:deploy": "codeberg-pages content/.vitepress/dist"
  },
(...)

With that added you can run:

npm run content:deploy

That will create a new branch called "pages" where the build output will stay.