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aphid release

aphid 0.1.0

2026-04-28 · LHelge

aphid 0.1.0 is out. This is the first tagged release — enough is working to build and deploy a real site, which is what you're reading right now.

What's in the box

The core feature set, the things that make aphid useful rather than just a toy:

  • Three content types — blog posts, wiki pages, and standalone pages, each with their own frontmatter shape and URL scheme. See Frontmatter for the details.
  • Wiki-links — [[slug]] and [[slug|Display text]] resolve across all content types. Broken links fail the build in aphid build and render visibly in aphid serve. Full details in Wiki Links.
  • Two-pass pipeline — a first pass indexes every file to build the slug map and backlink graph, then a second pass renders all pages in parallel via rayon.
  • Syntax highlighting — fenced code blocks are highlighted with syntect using CSS classes, so colors are controlled entirely by the theme stylesheet. See Markdown.
  • Auto heading anchors — every heading gets a slug-based id attribute. Duplicate headings on the same page get -2, -3 suffixes.
  • Tag index pages — blog posts can be tagged, and aphid generates a page per tag plus a tags index.
  • Backlinks — wiki pages show which other pages link to them.
  • Dev server with live reload — aphid serve runs an axum server with file watching and WebSocket-driven browser refresh. See Dev server.
  • Embedded default theme — a fresh project needs only aphid.toml and a content/ directory. The default theme is compiled into the binary. Override it by setting theme_dir. See Themes.
  • Clean URLs — content/wiki/foo.md is served at /wiki/foo/, backed by dist/wiki/foo/index.html.
  • GitHub Pages deployment — aphid build produces a self-contained output directory ready for any static host. See Deployment for a ready-made GitHub Actions workflow.

What's not in 0.1.0

Some things are deliberately deferred:

  • Drafts — no draft: true support yet. Everything in content/ is published.
  • RSS / Atom feeds — planned but not v1.
  • Pagination — the blog index and tag pages list all posts on a single page.
  • Search — no client-side search. The wiki is small enough that the index page and cross-links cover navigation for now.
  • aphid init — a scaffolding command to set up a clean project, similar to cargo init.
  • Mermaid diagrams — render mermaid fenced code blocks as diagrams.
  • Sitemap generation — emit a sitemap.xml for search engines.
  • Open Graph / SEO meta tags — templates should emit <meta og:*> tags from existing frontmatter fields like description and image.
  • ...and more.

Try it

cargo install aphid --locked
aphid --version

Create an aphid.toml, add some markdown files under content/, and run aphid serve to see it live. The Installation and CLI reference pages have the full setup guide.