Installation

Two things to install: the CLI (a .NET global tool) and the framework packages (referenced from your docs project). Most consumers use the CLI to scaffold a fresh project, which wires the packages automatically.

Prerequisites

Prop Type Default Description
.NET SDKRequired 10.0+ — .NET 10 or newer. Verify with `dotnet --version`.
git any — For version control. Not strictly required to run ShellDocs : required for publishing to GitHub Pages / Cloudflare / Netlify from a repo.

Install the CLI

ShellDocs.CLI is a .NET global tool. Install once, use from any directory.

bash 
dotnet tool install -g ShellDocs.CLI --prerelease
Why --prerelease

The --prerelease flag is required while ShellDocs is on 0.x.y-alpha versions. dotnet tool install skips prerelease packages by default. Drop the flag once 1.0 ships.

Verify:

bash 
shelldocs --help

You should see init, add, dev, build, preview in the command list.

Update the CLI

bash 
dotnet tool update -g ShellDocs.CLI --prerelease

Pulls the latest published version from nuget.org.

The framework packages

If you're scaffolding via shelldocs init, the CLI adds these to your .csproj automatically. If you're wiring an existing Blazor project by hand, add:

dotnet add package ShellDocs.Components --prerelease
dotnet add package ShellDocs.Tokens --prerelease

ShellDocs.Core and ShellDocs.Markdown come in transitively : no need to reference them directly.

The package family

Prop Type Default Description
ShellDocs.CLI global tool — `shelldocs init`, `add`, `dev`, `build`. Installed once, works from any directory.
ShellDocs.Components RCL — The chrome (layout, sidebar, search, header) and content primitives (Callout, Card, Steps, CodeGroup, TypeTable, more).
ShellDocs.Tokens RCL — Shared CSS variables. shadcn-compatible names for interop with ShellUI and other design systems.
ShellDocs.Core library (transitive) — Navigation graph, search index, markdown plain-text extraction.
ShellDocs.Markdown library (transitive) — Markdig pipeline, frontmatter parser, razor:preview and inline-component slot extractor.

Next

Quick start
Scaffold a fresh site and see it running in ~5 minutes.
Project structure
What `shelldocs init` created, and what each folder does.