Skip to content

Get started

Zensical is a modern static site generator designed to simplify building and maintaining project documentation. It's built by the creators of Material for MkDocs and shares the same core design principles and philosophy – batteries included, easy to use, with powerful customization options.

You can learn more about how both projects interconnect with each other here.

Installation

Zensical is written in Rust and Python, and is published as a Python package. We recommend to use a Python virtual environment when installing with pip or with uv. Both options automatically install all necessary dependencies alongside Zensical.

Prerequisites

You need to have Python and a Python package manager installed on your system before you install Zensical. We recommend you follow the Python Setup and Usage instructions for your operating system provided on the Python website. Modern Python distributions include the pip package manager, so unless you are developing Python software and use uv, this is the simplest option to install Zensical on your system.

Install with pip

Zensical can be installed into a virtual environment with pip.

Open up a terminal window and install Zensical by first setting up a virtual environment and then using pip to install the Zensical package into it:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install zensical

Open up a Command Window and install Zensical by first setting up a virtual environment and then using pip to install the Zensical package into it:

python3 -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate
pip install zensical

Open up a terminal window and install Zensical by first setting up a virtual environment and then using pip to install the Zensical package into it:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install zensical

Install with uv

If you are developing software using Python, chances are you're already using uv as a package manager, which has become popular in recent years. To install Zensical with uv, use:

uv init
uv add zensical

uv init
uv add zensical

uv init
uv add zensical