Skip to content
Logo
Cecil Desktop
On this page

Getting started

This page guides you from the download to the preview of your first site.

Requirements

  • Windows 10 or later (x64 or ARM64)
  • macOS 12 or later (Intel or Apple Silicon)

PHP and Cecil are embedded in the app: you don't need to install them. Linux is planned.

Install

Download the installer for your system from the download section of the website, then run it.

Open a site

On the first launch, the Sites screen is empty. To add a site you already have, do one of the following:

  • click Open folder (File › Open folder…, Ctrl/⌘+O) and pick the folder of your Cecil site;
  • drop the folder of the site on the window.
The Sites screen, listing the sites with the state of their last build and publication

Cecil Desktop works directly on your files: nothing is moved or converted, and your site stays a standard Cecil project that you can still build from the command line.

Create a site

Click New site (File › New site…, Ctrl/⌘+N), then follow the 3 steps of the wizard:

  1. Location: the parent folder and the name of the site folder.

  2. Site: title, baseline, base URL (/, or the URL where the site will be published), description, author and main language. You can change them later in the configuration.

  3. Starting point:

    • Empty site: the configuration and a homepage, with the default templates of Cecil;
    • Demo: example pages, templates and assets (blog, documentation);
    • Theme: a theme of the catalog, installed after the site is created.

    You can also add a GitHub Actions workflow that deploys the site to GitHub Pages.

The last step of the New site wizard: the starting point of the site

Click Create site: the site opens on its Overview.

Find your way around

The window of a site has 3 main areas:

  • the sidebar, on the left, lists your sites and the sections of the open site: Overview, Content, Themes, Publishing and Configuration (Ctrl/⌘+1 to Ctrl/⌘+5). Ctrl/⌘+B folds it into a rail of icons;
  • the main area shows the selected section;
  • the Output panel, at the bottom (Ctrl/⌘+J), shows the logs of the preview, of the builds, of the publications and of the diagnosis.

The command palette (Ctrl/⌘+K) gives access to your sites and to all the actions, from the keyboard.

The command palette, listing the sections of the site, the sites and the actions

Preview, build, publish

From any section of a site:

Action Shortcut What it does
Preview Ctrl/⌘+P Starts the local server of Cecil and opens the site in your browser. Pages reload when you save a file.
Build Ctrl/⌘+Shift+B Builds the site into its output folder, with the logs and the problems in the Output panel.
Publish Ctrl/⌘+Shift+P Sends the site (its last build, or a new one) to its publishing target (Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages or AWS S3).

To publish, add a target in the Publishing section of the site, with a hosting account set in Preferences (Ctrl/⌘+,).

Updates

On Windows, Cecil Desktop downloads its updates and installs them when you restart it. Each update embeds the latest version of Cecil. To check right away, use Help › Check for Updates….

On macOS, download the new version from the website and install it over the previous one.

Remove a site from the list

In the sidebar, right-click a site and choose Remove from list. Only the entry is removed: the files of the site stay on your disk.