It's designed to be flexible and share your writing widely, so it's built around plain text and can publish to the _fediverse_ via ActivityPub. It's easy to install and lightweight.
First, download the [latest release](https://github.com/writeas/writefreely/releases/latest) for your OS. It includes everything you need to start your blog.
Now extract the files from the archive, change into the directory, and do the following steps:
```bash
# 1) Log into MySQL and run:
# CREATE DATABASE writefreely;
#
# 2) Import the schema with:
mysql -u YOURUSERNAME -p writefreely <schema.sql
# 3) Configure your blog
./writefreely --config
# 4) Generate data encryption keys (especially for production)
./keys.sh
# 5) Run
./writefreely
# 6) Check out your site at the URL you specified in the setup process
# 7) There is no Step 7, you're done!
```
## Development
Ready to hack on your site? Here's a quick overview.
### Prerequisites
* [Go 1.10+](https://golang.org/dl/)
* [Node.js](https://nodejs.org/en/download/)
### Setting up
```bash
go get github.com/writeas/writefreely/cmd/writefreely
```
Create your database, import the schema, and configure your site [as shown above](#quick-start).
Now generate the CSS:
```bash
make install
make # Run this whenever you update your styles
```
Lastly, run the application (you could put this into a quick shell script called `run.sh`)