Digital Garden

Digital Garden is an opinionated, batteries-included boilerplate for MDX authoring with Next.js that delivers a ready-to-deploy static site with search, theming, and CI/CD already configured.

What is Digital Garden?

Digital Garden is a starter boilerplate built on Next.js, the React-based framework, designed for authoring Markdown and MDX content into a static website. It accepts Markdown/MDX files as input and outputs a deployable site with client-side search, syntax highlighting, and a themeable layout. The project runs locally with Yarn (yarn then yarn dev) and can be deployed to Vercel or Netlify.

Key Features

• MDX authoring — Uses next-mdx-remote to load and render Markdown/MDX content at build time, allowing interactive components inside posts.
• Themeable styling — Theme UI and styled-components provide a design system with dark/light theme support.
• Site-wide search — A search feature is included so visitors can find content across all notes or posts.
• Syntax highlighting — Code blocks are highlighted out of the box, suitable for technical content.
• CI/CD pipeline — Jest tests are configured to run through GitHub Actions, with a badge showing CI status.
• Code quality tooling — ESLint and Prettier are set up for linting and formatting consistency.
• Easy deployment — The boilerplate works with Vercel or Netlify; only a fork or clone and a few commands are needed.

Who is it for?

• Developers building a digital garden — Fork or clone the repo, add your MDX notes, and publish a personal knowledge base without wiring up a build system yourself.
• Technical writers — Use the Markdown/MDX support to create documentation or blog sites with built-in search and theme switching.
• Indie hackers and bloggers — Launch a static site quickly with linting, tests, and deployment configuration already in place.

What can you do with Digital Garden?

• Publish a personal knowledge base — Write notes in Markdown and get a searchable, themeable site with dark mode support.
• Create a technical blog — Embed React components in MDX to add interactive examples while keeping a clean reading experience.
• Prototype a static site — Start from this boilerplate to quickly generate a static site with test coverage and CI already wired.

What's on the roadmap?

The project lists several planned features in its repository: multiple content directories, specifying layout through frontmatter, Storybook integration, roam-style backlinks, link previews, last updated timestamps, pagination, image optimization, and a CLI for markdown parity. None of these are implemented yet.