Open Free Books

Free, open-source textbooks for every learner — from elementary school through university. The site is fully static, open on GitHub, and deployed to Cloudflare.

Live site: openfreebooks.org

Stack

Layer	Tool
Site generator	Zola
Theme	Custom theme in themes/openfreebooks/
Interactivity	Solid.js (header, marquee, scroll reveal, theme toggle)
JS build	Bun + Vite
Hosting	Cloudflare Workers (static assets via Wrangler)

Book content will use Markdown. Canvas features will follow the JSON Canvas standard (Obsidian-compatible).

Prerequisites

• Zola 0.19+
• Bun (for frontend build)
• Wrangler 4.x (for deploy)

Project layout

content/                 # Pages and sections (Markdown)
static/                  # Site assets copied to public/ (favicons, manifest)
themes/openfreebooks/    # Zola theme
  templates/             # HTML (Tera)
  sass/                  # Stylesheets (compiled to main.css)
  static/js/bundle.js    # Built Solid bundle (committed for simple deploys)
frontend/src/            # Solid.js source
public/                  # Zola build output (gitignored) — Wrangler deploy target
wrangler.jsonc           # Cloudflare Workers static assets config

Development

Install JS dependencies:

bun install

Build the Solid bundle and start Zola’s dev server:

bun run build:js
zola serve

Open http://127.0.0.1:1111. Re-run bun run build:js (or bun run dev:js in another terminal) when you change frontend/.

Production build

bun run build

This runs vite build (outputs to themes/openfreebooks/static/js/bundle.js) and then zola build (outputs to public/).

Deploy to Cloudflare

bun run build
wrangler deploy

The Worker name is openfreebooks (see wrangler.jsonc). Assets are served from public/ with no server-side logic.

Configuration

Site-wide settings live in zola.toml:

• base_url — canonical URL for feeds and absolute links
• [extra] — site_title, github_url, browse_url, about_url (used in templates and the Solid config block)

Theme notes

The visual design is inspired by manlung.work: paper background with grain, Instrument Serif headings, warm ochre accent (#9a6b2e), and light/dark mode (system preference plus a toggle).

Keep themes/openfreebooks/static/ clean. Only committed built assets belong there (currently js/bundle.js). Do not copy Zola’s public/ output into the theme static/ folder — that pollutes public/js/ on the next build.

License

Open source — see the repository license file when added.