Art Menagerie is designed to be run on your local computer.

First Steps

The very first steps to to running Art Menagerie:

1. Download the latest version
2. Install and run Art Menagerie
3. Open your browser to: http://localhost:4747/admin/

You should be greeted with the admin interface in your browser.

Website Setup

1. Visit the site configuration page: http://127.0.0.1:4747/admin/site/config/
2. Set the Title, Subtitle, and Description.
3. Make sure Canonical URL is set to the public base URL of your website once you know it. You can leave this set to the default if you do not know your website URL yet. This setting is especially important for Link Previews to work!

Don't forget to save your changes by pressing the Update button at the top or bottom of the page.

Note that you can set defaults values for your posts in the site configuration page as well.

Your First Page

Pages and Media are combined into one concept: a Post!

When you first run Art Menagerie, a home page will be created. Let's edit it by:

1. Navigate to the posts section: http://127.0.0.1:4747/admin/post/list/
2. Open the page titled Welcome to my Website!
3. Press the Edit button to edit this page
4. Make some changes to the Body and/or Title
5. Press the Save button at the top or bottom of the page

When view your page in the admin interface you will see extra information that your viewers may not see immediately.

To view the page as your viewers would see it, press the Render option. (This takes out out of the admin interface so you may return using the Back button in your browser.)

Posts have an optional Link field. The home page has this set to / so viewers visiting your site will be greeted with this page first. Most of the time you do not have to worry about setting this unless you want a pretty URL for certain posts (for example setting it to /about for an About Me page).

Export your Website

When you navigate to the Export page at http://localhost:4747/admin/export/ you will have several ways to export your website:

1. Generate your website to a directory/folder (set to www by default)
2. Download as a .zip file
3. Backup the database

Normally, when you run your website on your computer, you should only need the first (1) option. By default, this will generate your website to HTML, CSS, and other files to the www directory located where you run Art Menagerie.

If you prefer the command-line you can run this instead:

./artmenagerie -gen

This is equivalent to pressing the Generate button on the Export page.

You can then transfer the files in the www directory to where you host your website using a tool like:

• WinSCP for Windows
• Cyberduck for Mac
• rsync or Rclone

If Art Menagerie is being run for you as a service (not on your computer), then you can use the second (2) option to download your generated website as a .zip file and transfer your webhost. However, use the first (1) option if you can.

The Not-So-Secret Third Option

(Section title is a nonbinary joke)

The third (3) option is used when Art Menagerie is being run for you as a service (not your computer) and you want to backup your database. You can also use this method to run Art Menagerie locally or transfer your database to another service. This way you are never locked in to any vendor/platform to provide Art Menagerie.

Most of the time you should not need this option, but it is good to know you have it for when you do.