Create an individual website¶

This tutorial creates a small English-language academic website with About, Research, Supervision, Teaching and Contact pages. The people and institution are fictional. Replace them with your own information before publishing.

1. Generate and run the starter¶

Follow installation, using --kind individual --theme modern. Run all following commands in the generated website directory. Keep pixi run --locked dev running while you edit; content changes refresh the preview.

2. Set your identity¶

Replace sciastro.yaml with:

sciastro.yaml

schemaVersion: 1
kind: individual
name: Alex Morgan
description: Numerical methods, teaching and scientific software.
affiliation: Example University
url: https://example.org
base: /
locales: [en]
defaultLocale: en
theme: modern
home:
  body: home.en.md
copyright: © 2026 Alex Morgan
footer: Fictional profile for the SciAstro tutorial.

The url is an origin, without a subdirectory. Replace it with your final domain before deployment. base sets a hosting subdirectory if needed. Omitting the bibliography here removes the starter's fictional publication list.

3. Write the introduction¶

Replace content/home.en.md:

content/home.en.md

I am a researcher at Example University, working on numerical methods for
transport models and reproducible scientific software.

This website collects my research interests, teaching and supervision activities.

4. Define research once¶

Replace content/research.yaml:

content/research.yaml

- id: transport
  title: Numerical transport models
  summary: Discretization and verification of transport equations.
  body: research/transport.en.md

Create content/research/transport.en.md:

content/research/transport.en.md

We study discretizations for advection and diffusion equations. Current questions
include conservation, stability and the effect of mesh resolution.

## Computational work

Software accompanies our studies with documented environments and verification
examples. Links to actual repositories and publications can be added here.

The brief summary becomes a card on About; the detailed text appears at /research/#transport. Keep id stable so shared links remain valid.

5. Add supervision¶

Replace content/team.yaml:

content/team.yaml

- id: jamie-lee
  name: Jamie Lee
  role: student
  status: active
  level: masters
  startYear: 2026
  topic: Conservative methods for transport equations

For individual sites, the page is titled Supervision. level must match one of the configured student levels. When a student graduates, change status: alumni and add endYear. Each student can have a circular photo and custom framing. Without a photo, SciAstro uses a configurable institution symbol or its built-in fictional mark. See portraits and fallback symbols to configure the shared default or override it for one student.

6. Add teaching and contact pages¶

Replace content/pages.yaml:

content/pages.yaml

- slug: teaching
  title: Teaching
  icon: lucide:graduation-cap
  body: teaching.en.md
- slug: contact
  title: Contact
  icon: lucide:mail
  body: contact.en.md

Create or replace these Markdown files:

content/teaching.en.md

## Courses

**Introduction to numerical methods** — Example University, 2026.

Topics include interpolation, linear systems and numerical integration.

## Short courses and talks

Add course materials, slides and recording links here as they become available.

content/contact.en.md

Department of Applied Mathematics, Example University.

Room A-12. [Email](mailto:alex@example.org).

For a CV, put a PDF in public/files/cv.pdf, add another page record and link to [Download CV](/files/cv.pdf) in its Markdown. SciAstro serves the supplied PDF; it does not generate or synchronize CV files.

7. Check and build¶

pixi run --locked build

You should have five pages plus 404.html. Open About, follow the research card, check Supervision and switch between light and dark mode. The complete YAML and Markdown snippets in this tutorial are loaded by automated documentation tests.

Then deploy the website. For richer layouts, use composed sections to add software cards, course cards, professional history or partnership logos without duplicating Astro templates.