Installation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

There are no prebuilt downloads of the desktop app at the moment, so installing it means building it from the repository. The build is driven by electron-vite, and packaging into an installer by electron-builder; both are already in devDependencies, so there’s nothing to install beyond npm install.

What you’ll need#

Node.js 22.12 or later, with npm.
Hugo on your PATH, if you want the live preview. The app runs without it; you just won’t get the Hugo server.
A Hugo site with an admin/site.yaml in it (admin/cms.yaml is optional, as everywhere else). If yours doesn’t have one yet, running the web dev server against it once (HUGO_ROOT=/path/to/site npm run dev, see Installation) writes both files.

Running from source#

Clone and install as for the web version, then start Electron in development mode:

Local Hugo server

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The CSS-based preview in the browser is a reconstruction of what Hugo would render, and for anything beyond plain Markdown it’s a guess. The desktop app can do better because it has a real filesystem and, if you’ve installed it, a real Hugo. It starts hugo server for the site you’ve opened and shows the actual rendered page in the preview pane, with Hugo’s live reload rebuilding it every time you save.

Desktop app on Emet CMS

Installation

What you’ll need#

Running from source#

Local Hugo server