ShellDocs.CLI 0.1.0-alpha

ShellDocs

The docs framework for .NET. Beautiful, animated, Cmd+K-searchable documentation sites, powered by Blazor and Tailwind. Compose with ShellUI (or any Blazor component library) — like fumadocs composes with shadcn/ui.

Status: 0.1.0-alpha — first public release. See CHANGELOG and ROADMAP. Publish steps live in docs/RELEASING.md.

Why ShellDocs

Every .NET UI library ends up hand-rolling their own docs site. MudBlazor, Radzen, AvaloniaUI — each spent months rebuilding a sidebar, a search box, a code block, a theme toggle, from scratch. None of it is reusable.

ShellDocs is the "just use this" answer. It's the docs framework for the whole .NET ecosystem.

• Markdown authoring with YAML frontmatter, inline Razor tags, and live component previews (```razor:preview)
• File-based routing — drop a .md in content/ and it's a page
• Cmd+K search with a build-time client-side index — no backend needed
• Blazor-native — components render as real Razor, not iframes, not screenshots
• Composable with any Blazor component library — ShellUI, MudBlazor, Radzen, your own
• Tailwind CSS v4 — same aesthetic as ShellUI + shadcn, same theme tokens for interop
• Animated — page transitions, sidebar collapses, scroll-spy, prefers-reduced-motion aware
• Static site output — deploy to GitHub Pages, Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, anywhere

Quick start

# Create a new Blazor WASM app
dotnet new blazorwasm -n MyDocs
cd MyDocs

# Install the ShellDocs CLI
dotnet tool install -g ShellDocs.CLI

# Initialize the docs site
shelldocs init

# Author content in Markdown
shelldocs new page introduction

# Develop with hot-reload
shelldocs dev

# Ship it
shelldocs build

Coexists with ShellUI (and any Blazor UI library)

ShellDocs uses the same Tailwind v4 setup and CSS variable contract as ShellUI. Both libraries share the same theme tokens (--background, --foreground, --primary, --border, --radius, etc.), so you can drop them into the same page and they compose seamlessly — the fumadocs + shadcn pattern, ported to .NET.

@* Your docs page — ShellUI components inline in Markdown *@
<Button Variant="ButtonVariant.Default">A ShellUI button</Button>
<Callout Type="Tip">A ShellDocs callout</Callout>

Under the hood ShellDocs takes a hard dependency on ShellUI.Components for base primitives (Button, Dialog, Command, Sidebar, etc.). Zero style clash.

Package family

Optional / v2:

• ShellDocs.Xml — extract <TypeTable> from XML doc comments
• ShellDocs.Themes.Fuma, ShellDocs.Themes.Nextra — theme presets
• ShellDocs.OpenApi — OpenAPI spec → API reference pages

Documentation

• Design — what ShellDocs is, positioning, primitives, ecosystem story
• Roadmap — branch-by-branch implementation plan
• Architecture — technical architecture: package boundaries, service registration, markdown pipeline, navigation graph, search index

Once we ship 0.2.0-alpha, official docs will live at shelldocs.dev (dogfooded on ShellDocs itself).

Related projects

• ShellUI — the Blazor component library ShellDocs is built with
• shellui.dev (coming soon) — ShellUI's own docs site, built with ShellDocs

Contributing

0.1.0-alpha is scaffolding-first — architecture and API surface are still moving. Once we hit 0.2.0-alpha, we'll open up contributions with a proper CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT — do whatever you want, no warranty.