Build a documentation website - and a printable PDF - from a directory of Markdown files. What mdBook, MkDocs, and similar tools do - written in Jennifer.
A grimoire is a book of magical knowledge - astrological rules, lists of angels and demons, spells, and instructions for making talismans - copied and recopied across Europe from the late Middle Ages into the eighteenth century. The best known are the Clavicula Salomonis, the Grimorium Verum, and the Grand Grimoire.
The word comes from Old French gramaire, which is also the root of grammar and of glamour: a book of rules that, to anyone who could not read it, looked like sorcery. This one only makes websites.
bin/grimoire init my-book # scaffold a book
bin/grimoire build # build the site
bin/grimoire build --pdf # site plus the printable book
bin/grimoire pdf # the printable book on its own
bin/grimoire serve # build, then preview on :8080
bin/grimoire themes # list the built-in themesPoint it at a directory of Markdown. If that directory holds a SUMMARY.md it
is used as the book outline (the mdBook shape); if it does not, the outline is
derived from the directory tree (the way MkDocs does). The output is a
self-contained static site - themed, searchable, with a mandatory dark mode -
that works served from a web root, served from a subdirectory, or opened
straight off the disk over file://, search included. Nothing is fetched from
anywhere unless you opt in.
The words Grimoire adds around your text - "Search", "On this page", the
colour-mode buttons - follow the book's language, in English and ten more.
Ten themes ship, each with a light and a dark palette:
Everything lives in docs/, which Grimoire builds with itself:
| Introduction | what it does, in one page |
| Installation | from a checkout, or from a container with Docker or Podman |
| Commands | every subcommand and flag |
| Configuration | grimoire.toml, key by key |
| Themes | the ten themes, with screenshots, and how to write one |
| Internals | the source layout, and what Grimoire does to the Markdown |
| Performance | where the time goes, and why it scales the way it does |
bin/grimoire build --src docs --out docs-siteJennifer 0.25.0 or newer. build, pdf, init, and themes run on both the
default binary and jennifer-tiny; serve needs the default binary, since
jennifer-tiny stubs httpd.
Or none of it: the installation page has the Docker and Podman lines, which need nothing on the machine but the container runtime.
grimoire.toml here builds docs/ - this documentation - so the repository is
its own worked example:
bin/grimoire serve # read it at http://127.0.0.1:8080/LGPL-3.0-only. Copyright (C) 2026 mplx <jennifer@mplx.dev>.