Getting started

Install & projects

Getting the app, creating a project, opening one, and what a project folder contains.

sitereal is an app for macOS, Windows and Linux. It runs on your machine, opens a folder and edits the site in it — nothing you build is uploaded anywhere. Signing in once puts the computer on your license.

Requirements

The app — macOS, Windows or Linux.
Node.js 20 or newer — installed once, from nodejs.org. A sitereal site is an Astro site, and the preview and the static export build it with Node. Everything after that is the app’s job, including installing a new project’s packages.
git — every new project gets a history of its own, which is what History and Publish work from.

The project manager

The window you land in is a grid of your projects. Each card is led by a picture of the project’s home page, taken for you whenever you open or save it. A project you have not opened yet shows a mark made from its name instead.

Pin a project to keep it at the front. Pins are ordering only; nothing on disk moves.
Forget a project to take it off the list. It deletes nothing but the picture.
Settings — the last entry in the rail — holds what belongs to the app, not to a site: your license and computers, your GitHub account, where new projects are created, and updates. A project’s own settings live inside the project window.

Creating a project

Give it a name and a location. sitereal writes a complete Astro project:

my-site/
  site.sitereal            the project document — everything the builder knows
  package.json             what Astro needs to build the site
  astro.config.mjs
  tsconfig.json
  .gitignore
  .mcp.json                lets an AI assistant work on this project
  .vscode/                 settings for anybody who opens it in VS Code
  public/favicon.svg
  src/
    layouts/PlainBase.astro   the layout every page uses — yours from here on
    pages/                    your pages
    components/               your components

It also gives the project a history of its own and installs the packages the site needs — there is nothing to run yourself. The project is ready to open the moment it appears in the grid.

If you have marked a preset as the one new projects start from, it is applied before the project file is first written — the project has never existed without your design system. The site's own identity (name, URL, social links) is never carried by a preset. See Presets.

Opening a project

Open any project from the grid, or a folder that holds a site.sitereal with Open Project…. Each project opens in its own window, and switching to another one replaces it rather than piling windows up.

Seeing the real site

The canvas draws your pages itself, instantly, without building anything. To see a page exactly as it will ship — in your own browser, with its scripts running — press ▶ in the top bar. sitereal saves first, starts a preview of the whole site the first time you ask, and opens the page you are on.

Both views are the same files. Editing src/pages/about.astro by hand and editing it on the canvas are two ways of touching one thing — with the exception of the generated files listed in Files, git & deploy, which are rewritten from the project document on every save.