Zetta

Custom Templates

By Zetta · January 3, 2025

zetta documentation templates

Zetta uses a simple Mustache-style template system with {{placeholder}} substitution. You can override the default templates to fully customize your blog's appearance.

Template Sources

Templates can come from two places:

  1. Built-in defaults in templates/default/
  2. Custom templates via TEMPLATES_REPO_URL or LAYOUT_PATH

When TEMPLATES_REPO_URL is set, Zetta clones that repo into templates/custom/ and auto-detects the layout.

Layout Template

The layout wraps every page. It receives these placeholders:

Placeholder Description
{{title}} Page title
{{slug}} Article slug (on article pages)
{{keywords}} Comma-separated tags
{{description}} Article blurb
{{body}} Page content

Partials

Partials are reusable HTML fragments included via {{> name}} syntax. Place them in a partials/ directory alongside your layout.

Key content partials that control page rendering:

  • article.html — single article view
  • article-list.html / article-list-item.html — article listing
  • tag-list.html / tag-list-item.html — tag display
  • listing-item.html / listing-item-blurb.html — listing items
  • 404.html / 500.html — error pages

Git-Synced Templates

Set TEMPLATES_REPO_URL to a Git repo containing your custom templates. Zetta will clone it and auto-set LAYOUT_PATH if it finds a layout.html in the repo root.

TEMPLATES_REPO_URL=https://github.com/you/blog-theme.git

Webhook

Trigger an immediate sync (articles + templates) by sending a POST request:

curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/webhook \
  -H "x-webhook-secret: your_secret"