Install Ark from the Python Package Index using pip:

$ pip install ark

Once Ark is installed, create a new directory for your site and cd into it:

$ mkdir mysite
$ cd mysite

Initialize the site directory using the init command:

$ ark init

Ark will create the following directory structure for your site:

mysite/
|-- inc/         # includes directory for menus, etc.
|-- lib/         # library directory for themes
|-- src/         # source directory for text files
|-- site.py      # site configuration file

Ark initializes your src directory with a simple skeleton site which you can build immediately using the build command:

$ ark build

You can run the build command from the site directory itself or from any of its subdirectories. It tells Ark to render the text files in the src directory into HTML and place the output in an out directory.

Run the build command and take a look at the output. You can open the HTML files directly in your browser or use Ark's builtin test server to serve the contents of the out directory:

$ ark serve

This command will start the test server and automatically launch the default web browser to view the site. Hit Ctrl-C when you want to shut the server down.

Ark will build the site using its default graphite theme, which you can find in the lib folder. Try rebuilding the site using the debug theme which is less pretty but provides a lot of useful information that can help you when building or customizing your own themes:

$ ark build --theme debug

You can run ark --help to see a list of all the available commands. Note that you can get help for a specific command by running

$ ark help <command>

replacing <command> with the command name.