Pick a business site, a blog or a portfolio and tell the builder what it is about. It writes the first version, you choose a theme, colours and photos, and you download a ready-to-run EmDash site for Cloudflare. You own every line of it.
Not a mock-up: a complete project that you run, change and deploy yourself.
A business homepage with services and questions, three starter posts for a blog, or your projects for a portfolio. The AI only states what you told it, and you can edit every word in the builder or later in the EmDash admin.
One of six themes with your brand colours, matching fonts and photos made for your site. Light and dark mode come built in.
Underneath is the official EmDash marketing, blog or portfolio template: Astro, a visual admin with passkey login, D1 for content and R2 for media. No lock-in, no extra service from us.
About fifteen minutes, most of it waiting for npm. You only need a terminal.
You needNode.js 22.16 or newerA Cloudflare account with R2 activated, for going liveA browser that supports passkeys
Open the builder, pick a business site, blog or portfolio, describe it and click Make my first version. Change the theme, colours, text and photos until you like it, then go to Download.
Add your contact email and your domain if you have one. The domain goes into the config, so you can skip a step later.
# you get a zip named after your business
northwind-coffee-roasters-emdash-starter.zipUnzip the file, open a terminal in the folder and install the dependencies. Then start the dev server.
cd northwind-coffee-roasters npm install npm run dev
Open localhost:4321/_emdash/admin. The setup wizard loads your pages, posts or projects, menu and photos from seed/seed.json.
Then you create your admin account. EmDash has no passwords: you log in with a passkey (your fingerprint, face or device PIN).
# open in your browser
http://localhost:4321/_emdash/adminEdit the content in the admin: pages, posts or projects, menus, site title and the media library for your own photos. For code-level changes, these are the files to know (the README in your starter lists the ones for your template):
| Colours, corners, type scale | src/styles/theme.css |
| Fonts | astro.config.mjs |
| Contact email | src/pages/contact.astro |
| Page layouts | src/pages/ |
Check EMDASH_SITE_URL in wrangler.jsonc: it must be the exact address of your live site, or setup and passkey login fail there.
First time on R2? Activate it once in the Cloudflare dashboard under Storage & databases, R2, Overview. Cloudflare takes you through a checkout; usage within the free allowance costs nothing. Without it, the deploy cannot create your media bucket.
Then log in to Cloudflare and deploy. The first deploy creates your D1 database and R2 bucket.
# wrangler.jsonc
"vars": {
"EMDASH_SITE_URL": "https://yourdomain.com"
}
npx wrangler login
npm run deployYour local content stays on your machine; the live site starts with an empty database. Open /_emdash/admin on your live address and run the wizard once more. It loads the same seed, and you create your passkey for the live site.
To use your own domain, add it under Workers & Pages, your worker, Domains & Routes in the Cloudflare dashboard.
# open in your browser
https://yourdomain.com/_emdash/adminThe text was written by AI from what you entered. Read it through and correct anything that is not exactly true: what you offer, how you work, your projects, what your posts say. Then share your site.
EmDash is an open-source CMS built on Astro that runs on Cloudflare Workers. It has a visual admin for your content, stores pages in D1 and media in R2, and logs you in with passkeys. Read more at emdashcms.com.
Building and downloading costs nothing and needs no account. Hosting runs on your own Cloudflare account. Workers and D1 are on Cloudflare's free plan; R2 has to be activated once through a checkout in the dashboard, and includes 10 GB of storage, 1 million writes and 10 million reads per month at no charge. A small business site stays well within that. See R2 pricing for the current numbers.
An AI model writes it from what you enter, and a second pass removes claims you did not make. It still makes mistakes, so read every line before you publish.
No. Your work is saved in your own browser, and the zip is built on the spot when you download. Only the generated photo is kept on our server, because the setup wizard downloads it from there.
Yes. Upload them to the media library in the EmDash admin and pick them where you need them. The AI photos are only there so your starter looks complete from the first run.
A business site (homepage with services and questions, plus a contact page), a blog (three starter posts, categories, tags, an About page and RSS) or a portfolio (four projects, Work, About and Contact pages). Each is an official EmDash template, so you can add pages and collections later in the admin or in code.
No. EmDash Starters is an independent tool by Red Factory, built on the open-source EmDash marketing template.
Pick a business site, blog or portfolio, adjust what you like, download the code.