Introduction

Why Flame Exists

Building documentation sites often means wrestling with heavyweight frameworks, slow tooling, and complex configuration. Flame takes a different approach: minimal, Bun-native, and React-first. It is designed to let you focus on writing content while providing a fast, developer-friendly foundation.

Overview

Flame is a lightweight runtime for building documentation websites using React, MDX, and filesystem-based routing — all running on Bun.

• React-first — JSX/TSX, hooks, component composition
• MDX content — write Markdown with embedded React components
• Filesystem routing — auto-discover pages from docs/ folder
• Lightweight SSR — server-side rendering without a heavy framework
• Client hydration — interactive islands for sidebar, TOC, and MDX components
• HMR — instant reload on content changes during development
• Static build — pre-render all pages to static HTML for deployment
• Built-in search — full-text search index generated at build time
• Plugin system — extend the build pipeline and dev server with hooks
• Config-driven themes — switch presets or use custom colors via docu.json

Technology Stack

• Bun — runtime, bundler, file watcher
• React 19 + React DOM — rendering (SSR + client hydration)
• @docubook/core — MDX compilation, rehype/remark plugins
• @docubook/ui-react — reusable UI components (sidebar, TOC, navbar)
• @docubook/themes-colors — config-driven color system
• Tailwind CSS v4 + daisyUI v5 — styling
• Lucide React — icons

Build vs Dev Server