Get started

Quickstart

Get a ready-made page running live on Quilium, served from your machine, in about two minutes. No AI, no build step.

This is the fastest way to see Quilium work: take a ready-made demo and run it locally. It is the common starting point, before you choose how to build (with AI or by hand).

Before you start. You need a Quilium account, and Node 20 or later to install the CLI. Nothing else: no build tooling, no framework. The demo is a plain page (Tailwind via CDN) that Quilium serves dynamically.

1. Install the CLI

npm i -g quilium

2. Log in

quilium login

Your browser opens, you approve, and that is it. The CLI runs an OAuth flow and refreshes your credentials on its own.

If anything goes wrong later, start here. quilium whoami tells you which account you are signed in as, and whether it can reach the site. Run from a project folder it also gives the site verdict, which beats discovering a 403 in the middle of a push.

3. Create a site from the Quickstart demo

In the dashboard, create a new site. At the Starting point step, keep An existing theme in the library and choose Slate - Quickstart, a small pre-built page ready to run. The other option, a custom site built from your own HTML files, is the path the AI tutorial takes.

The Starting point step of site creation, with "An existing theme in the library" selected and the Slate - Quickstart theme picked.

4. Check out the project

Pull the demo into a local folder. quilium init takes the site ID and a target directory (--dir is required).

quilium init <site-id> --dir slate-quickstart

It writes a quilium.json (your site ID and name), then downloads the theme: the Liquid templates, the elements/ blocks and the public/ assets. Move into the folder:

cd slate-quickstart

Later, quilium pull re-downloads the theme on its own, when you want to pick up changes made elsewhere.

What you just pulled. The default page-type stacks four content blocks, hero, about, work and contact, in its row1 drop-zone. Each is a content-type with its own template under elements/. There is no collection and no routing yet, and that is the point.

5. Run it locally

Start the local server (it serves your local templates with your site's draft content):

quilium run

Starting Quilium. Use Ctrl+C to stop.

  Server running at http://localhost:9000
  Mode: draft

Open that URL. Your demo page is now served dynamically by Quilium, not as a static file. The server renders your local templates against the site's draft content, which is exactly what you want while you work. If port 9000 is taken, pass another one: quilium run 9016.

6. Make it yours

The page is your Liquid, running live. Open elements/hero.liquid, change something visible, the hero heading's markup, a Tailwind class, save, and reload the local page. Your edit is on screen. That is the whole "it's my HTML, and it's alive" moment.

That is the whole point. The page is already built from a few content blocks, and the copy they show (titles, the project list) lives as structured content in Quilium, which is what makes it editable without touching a template. The demo ships those blocks ready, so you have not modelled anything yourself yet. Growing the model, a real collection of projects, comes next.

There is nothing to restart and nothing to rebuild: the server reads your templates from disk on every request, so saving and reloading the page is the whole loop.

What is next

You have a site running locally. Pick where you go from here:

Whichever you pick, the next big idea is the content model, page-types, content-types, and turning a repeating list into a real collection. See The content model.

Last updated September 7, 2026.