Write your site in Python. ARKlight compiles it to standard HTML with CSS and vanilla JavaScript. The browser never executes Python — you get predictable, inspectable, portable output that works anywhere static files are hosted.
No Python runtime in production. No framework bloat. Just Python ergonomics at authorship time, and clean web artifacts at deployment time.
If you're new to ARKlight or evaluating whether it fits your needs, start with the documentation in this order:
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The Pitch — the problem ARKlight is trying to solve, its intended use, and the larger idea behind the project.
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What is ARKlight? — a concise explanation of what ARKlight is, how it works, and what it currently provides.
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Foundational Documentation — the deeper technical documentation covering ARKlight's architecture, compiler model, capabilities, design decisions, limitations, and roadmap.
Start with the pitch if you want to understand the why. Read What is ARKlight? for the practical picture. If you're still interested, the foundational documentation is the place to understand ARKlight in enough depth to decide whether it fits your project.
[Rei] Hey just a heads-up from the maintained.
[Rei] ARKlight is tool He has been working on
[Rei] for a while, personal reasons. It's
[Rei] clearly not ready for anything involving
[Rei] ⚠️ Production and until the compiler
[Rei] reaches a stable stage. ARKlight is only recommended
[Rei] for informal, personal, hobby projects.
[Rei] So if there's an audience waiting for it?
[Rei] Showing their support (eg: Stars, Forks, and such?)
[Rei] it motivates him.
ARKlight is under active development. Status lives in exactly one
place per kind of record: CHANGELOG.md for version
history, PROGRESS.md for the current snapshot and
what's next, and docs/Foundational/ARCHITECTURE.md
for the milestone roadmap. This page deliberately states no version
numbers or feature lists of its own, so it cannot fall out of date.
Refer to docs/Foundational/EXPERIMENTAL-APIS.md if you wished to use escape hatches.
pip install arklightThe first arklight command asks you to accept the license terms once.
From a source checkout, read LICENSE, then build with
pip install -e . --config-settings=yes-i-agree-to-arklight-license=1
(or set ARKLIGHT_ACCEPT_LICENSE=1); a plain pip install -e . stops
at that gate.
A runnable example, the Debian/Ubuntu package, upgrading an existing
checkout, and everything else needed to get running:
docs/Foundational/GETTING-STARTED.md.
Everything else -- the CLI, the compiler pipeline, the full authoring
API, the repository layout, running the tests, non-goals, and version
history -- is rooted in
docs/README.md. It is the single index for all of
it, so it's the only place documentation can go stale, and the only
place you need to check.
If you found a bug or have a question, please open an issue.
