README

A simple, fast, and flexible static site builder powered by Orchestra.

Solista lets you build fully static websites using plain files, without a database, without complexity, just content and structure.

✨ Features

• 📄 Write content in Markdown, JSON or plain text
• 🧠 Structured content with schemas
• 🔗 Internal linking system
• 🏞️ Image handling and transformations
• ⚡ Fast builds with caching
• 🧪 Rehearsal mode (no build required)
• 🎨 Theme-based rendering

🚀 Getting started

Create a new project:

composer create-project gspataro/solista my-site

Move into your project:

cd my-site

Build your site:

./solista build

Start the development server:

./solista rehearsal

Open your browser at:

http://localhost:8080

🧱 Project structure

A typical Solista project looks like this:

• /contents (all your media and contents)
• /public (production-ready website)
• /resources/themes (your themes)
• /blueprint.json (the main configuration file)

You are free to organize your contents as you prefer.

✍️ Writing content

Content is written in Markdown with frontmatter:

---
title: My first post
published_at: 2026-03-17
categories:
    - news
---

Your content goes here.

🔗 Internal links

Solista provides a custom protocol to link content safely:

orchestra://articles/hello-world.md

orchestra://blog

orchestra://blog.page-2

Links are automatically resolved to the correct URLs, even if your structure changes.

🏞️ Media

Media files live inside /contents/media.

You can reference them directly:

![Alt Text](/hello-world.jpg?variant=medium "Title Text")

Solista can:

• generate image variants
• handle resizing
• provide responsive srcset

🧪 Rehearsal mode

Rehearsal is a development server that renders pages on demand.

• no build required
• instant feedback
• perfect for content editing and theme development

⚡ Performance

Solista is designed to be fast:

• content is cached
• builds are incremental
• theme changes do not invalidate content parsing

🎨 Themes

Themes control how your content is rendered.

Solista ships with a minimal default theme intended for learning and experimentation.

A production-ready theme will be introduced in future releases.

If you change or update your theme, Solista will rely on the cached content to only re-build the pages, skipping the content parsing process.

🗺️ Roadmap

2.1

• Production-ready theme
• Template hierarchy
• Standard theme configuration (e.g. navigation)

2.2

• Content validation
• Schema-based structure enforcement

2.3

• SourceDriver (external sources support, e.g. APIs)

2.4

• Migration to symfony/console

2.5

• Rehearsal improvements
• Partial rebuilds based on requested resources

Future

• WIP

🚧 Work in progress

Some parts of the ecosystem are still evolving:

• 📚 Documentation / Wiki
• 🧾 JSON Schema support ($schema)
• 🧩 Extended developer tooling

🧠 Philosophy

Solista is built around a few core ideas:

• content should live in real files
• structure should be explicit
• tools should stay out of your way