Menu

Get started

Ten minutes, one install, and a working website at the end. Let's go.

1. Install

One line installs both basil (the server) and pars (the language):

curl -fsSL https://herbaceous.net/install.sh | sh

Prefer to see what you're running first? Read the script, or grab a binary from the releases page — macOS, Linux, and Windows, Apple Silicon and Intel. (On Windows, download the .zip and add it to your PATH.)

2. Sixty seconds of Parsley

Type pars to open the REPL, then try a few lines:

>> @now + @7d
@2026-07-19T18:06:16Z

>> $19.99 * 3
$59.97

>> [1, 2, 3].map(fn(x){ x * x })
[1, 4, 9]

Yes — dates, durations, and money are all real types you can just write. @7d is seven days. $19.99 is money (and it won't grow floating-point crumbs when you multiply it). Type exit when you're done.

3. Your first script

Parsley was made for turning data into web pages. Save this as users.pars:

let Page = fn({title, users}) {
    <html>
        <body>
            <h1>title</h1>
            <ul>
                for (user in users) {
                    <li><b>user.name</b> " — " user.email</li>
                }
            </ul>
        </body>
    </html>
}

let emailList <== CSV(@./email-list.csv)
<Page title="Active Users" users={emailList}/>

And this as email-list.csv:

name,email
Luke,luke@example.com
Leia,leia@example.com

Run it:

pars --raw users.pars

<html><body><h1>Active Users</h1><ul><li><b>Luke</b> — luke@example.com</li><li><b>Leia</b> — leia@example.com</li></ul></body></html>

That's the whole program. HTML is part of the language, <== slurps the CSV into a table, and the for loop runs right inside the markup. No template language, no imports, no build.

4. Your first website

basil --init myapp
cd myapp
basil --dev

Open http://localhost:8080. There's your site.

Now open site/index.pars in your editor and change it:

<h1>"My first Basil site"</h1>
<p>"Today is " + @now.dayName + "."</p>

Save, and the browser refreshes itself. That's the loop: edit, save, look. There is no step four.

5. Add a page

Routes are folders. To make /about, create site/about/ with a file named after the folder:

// site/about/about.pars
<h1>"About"</h1>
<p>"This page is one file."</p>

Visit http://localhost:8080/about — it's already live. (A file called index.pars works too; the folder-named version is just easier to spot in your editor when you have ten tabs open.)

6. Put it on the internet

When the folder is ready to be a website, it does not have to be restructured to get there. Run one command on a server you can SSH into:

basil --init /srv/mysite --server --host mysite.example.com --admin [your name]

…point your domain at that machine, add it as a Git remote from your folder, and publish:

git remote add origin https://[your name]@mysite.example.com/.git
git push -u origin main
basil publish

Basil fetches its own HTTPS certificate, checks each release before it goes live, and keeps every release so you can roll back. From then on it is git push to share and basil publish to go live.

Both ways round — starting on the server, or starting on your laptop like this — are written out step by step in Deployment.

Where next?

Stuck? Something confusing? Open an issue — early feedback is a gift.