Getting Started ​

This section will help you build a basic VitePress documentation site from ground up. If you already have an existing project and would like to keep documentation inside the project, start from Step 2.

Step. 1: Create a new project ​

Create and change into a new directory.

$ mkdir vitepress-starter && cd vitepress-starter

Then, initialize with your preferred package manager.

$ yarn init

Step. 2: Install VitePress ​

Add VitePress as a dependency for the project.

$ yarn add --dev vitepress

Create your first document.

$ mkdir docs && echo '# Hello VitePress' > docs/index.md

Step. 3: Boot up dev environment ​

Add some scripts to package.json.

{
  ...
  "scripts": {
    "docs:dev": "vitepress dev docs",
    "docs:build": "vitepress build docs",
    "docs:serve": "vitepress serve docs"
  },
  ...
}

Serve the documentation site in the local server.

$ yarn docs:dev

VitePress will start a hot-reloading development server at http://localhost:3000.

Step. 4: Add more pages ​

Let's add another page to the site. Create a file name getting-started.md along with index.md you've created in Step. 2. Now your directory structure should look like this.

.
├─ docs
│  ├─ getting-started.md
│  └─ index.md
└─ package.json

Then, try to access http://localhost:3000/getting-started and you should see the content of getting-started is shown.

This is how VitePress works basically. The directory structure corresponds with the URL path. You add files, and just try to access it.

What's next? ​

By now, you should have a basic but functional VitePress documentation site. But currently, the user has no way to navigate around the site because it's missing for example sidebar menu we have on this site.

To enable those navigations, we must add some configurations to the site. Head to configuration guide to learn how to configure VitePress.

If you would like to know more about what you can do within the page, for example, writing markdown contents, or using Vue Component, check out the "Writing" section of the docs. Markdown guide would be a greate starting point.

If you want to know how to customize how the site looks (Theme), and find out the features VitePress's default theme provides, visit Theme: Introduction.

When your documentation site starts to take shape, be sure to read the deployment guide.