Get Started

These quickstart tutorials are to get you up and running on your local computer 👩‍💻:

• learn how to write MyST Markdown 🖊
• export PDF, Word and $\LaTeX$ documents 📑
• and create a website like this one 🌎

The current tutorial will help you get up and running from scratch.

🛠 Throughout the tutorial, whenever you’re supposed to do something you will see a 🛠

Install the MyST Markdown CLI¶

🛠 Install MyST using your preferred packaging ecosystem. (See Install the MyST Markdown Command Line Interface for more details).

mamba install -c conda-forge mystmd

pip install mystmd

$ myst -v
Node.js (node) is required to run MyST, but could not be found.
Install Node.js in '/root/.local/share/myst/18.0.0'? (y/N): y
Attempting to install Node.js in /root/.local/share/myst/18.0.0 ...
Successfully installed Node.js 18.0.0
v1.3.4

npm install -g mystmd

🛠 Then, check that MyST has successfully been installed:

$ myst -v
v1.3.4

Build your first MyST site¶

Next we’ll download some sample content and use MyST to render it as a local web server!

Download example content¶

We provide an example project that includes a few simple markdown files and some Jupyter Notebooks. Through the course of the tutorials we will add content to these documents that show off some of the features of MyST.

🛠 Download the example content^[1], and navigate into the folder:

git clone https://github.com/jupyter-book/mystmd-quickstart.git
cd mystmd-quickstart

Initialize MyST in the content folder 🚀¶

Next we will create a myst.yml configuration file that is required to render your project.

🛠 Run myst

The myst command is a shortcut for myst init, which has a few more options for writing specific parts of the configuration file and a table of contents for your site.

$ myst

Welcome to the MyST Markdown CLI!! 🎉 🚀

myst init walks you through creating a myst.yml file.

You can use myst to:

 - create interactive websites from markdown and Jupyter Notebooks 📈
 - build & export professional PDFs and Word documents 📄

Learn more about this CLI and MyST Markdown at: https://mystmd.org

💾 Writing new project and site config file: myst.yml

Preview your MyST site locally¶

Preview a rendered version of the quickstart content to make sure that MyST is working properly.

🛠 When prompted, type Yes to install and serve your MyST content locally:

? Would you like to run "myst start" now? Yes

or manually serve the quickstart content with the following command:

myst start

Starting the server requires a theme, this will download the default book-theme from the MyST themes. This can take up to a minute the first time, and then will be cached in the _build/templates directory.

🐕 Fetching template metadata from https://api.mystmd.org/templates/site/myst/book-theme
💾 Saved template to path _build/templates/site/myst/book-theme
⤵️ Installing web libraries (can take up to 60 s)
📦 Installed web libraries in 13 s
📖 Built interactive-graphs.ipynb in 21 ms.
📖 Built paper.md in 32 ms.
📖 Built README.md in 35 ms.
📚 Built 3 pages for myst in 82 ms.

  ✨✨✨  Starting Book Theme  ✨✨✨

⚡️ Compiled in 524ms.

🔌 Server started on port 3000!  🥳 🎉

  👉  http://localhost:3000  👈

🛠 Open your web browser to http://localhost:3000^[2]

The example site in this tutorial only has three pages and by default the 01-paper.md page is seen in Figure 1, which has minimal styles applied to the content.

🎉 Congratulations, you just build your first MyST site!

Configuration and structure¶

The final section of this tutorial takes a closer look at the files that we just created, and aspects of your MyST project can be customized.

Folder Structure¶

If you are using a text editor, for example VSCode, open up the folder to explore the files:

quickstart/
  ├── 🆕 _build
  │   ├── exports
  │   ├── site
  │   │   ├── content
  │   │   ├── public
  │   │   └── config.json
  │   ├── temp
  │   └── templates
  │       ├── site/myst/book-theme
  │       └── tex/myst/arxiv_two_column
  ├── images
  │   ├── image.png
  │   └── image.gif
  ├── 01-paper.md
  ├── 02-notebook.ipynb
  ├── README.md
  └── 🆕 myst.yml

Running myst init added:

• myst.yml - the configuration file for your myst project and site
• _build - the folder containing the processed content and other site assets, which are used by the local web server.

The _build folder also contains your templates (including the site template you installed) and any exports you make (when we build a PDF the exported document will show up in the _build/exports folder). You can clean up the built files at any time using myst clean^[3].

Configure site and page options¶

If we open and look inside our myst.yml we will see a basic configuration like this:

# See docs at: https://mystmd.org/guide/frontmatter
version: 1
project:
  # title:
  # description:
  keywords: []
  authors: []
  # github:
  # bibliography: []
site:
  template: book-theme
  # title:
  # options:
  #   logo: my_logo.png
  nav: []
  actions:
    - title: Learn More
      url: https://mystmd.org/guide
  domains: []

There are two important parts to the myst.yml:

project:

The project holds metadata about the collection of files, such as authors, affiliations and licenses for all of the files, any of these values can optionally be overridden in a file. To see all of the options see Frontmatter, which includes which fields can be overridden by files in the project.

site:

The site holds template information about the website, such as the logo, navigation, site actions and which template to use.

🛠 In myst.yml: Change the “# title:” comment in site to “title: Fancy Title 🎩” and save

Saving the myst.yml will have triggered a “full site rebuild”^[4]. Take a look at the browser tab and you’ll see that it has updated:

Next steps ➡️¶

That’s it for this quickstart tutorial! You’ve now got MyST installed locally, and the basic structure of a MyST project ready to improve. You are well on your way to getting started with myst.

Here are some things to try for next steps:

• Organize a Table of contents
• Configure website downloads
• Choose a website template
• Customize logos and favicons

Check out the following tutorials for more step-by-step guides: