Hayden Bleasel from OpenAI released Blume, an open-source documentation framework, on 14 July 2026. The project shipped to npm as version 1.0.3 that same day. Developers drop Markdown files into a folder and the tool ships a documentation site. No app boilerplate is written or maintained afterward. The project is MIT-licensed.
What is Blume
Blume is a command-line tool paired with a component library for docs. It reads a folder of Markdown or MDX files. From that folder, it produces a production-grade documentation site. That output ships navigation, search, theming, and Open Graph images. Configuration stays optional and is added one file at a time. The code is a TypeScript monorepo; the published package sits at packages/blume. Blume’s own documentation, under apps/docs, is built with Blume itself. It requires Node.js 22.12 or newer. It runs with Bun, pnpm, npm, or yarn.
How Blume Works
Under the surface, Blume generates and drives a hidden Astro project. First, the CLI loads blume.config.ts and scans your content into a graph. Next, it writes an Astro project into a .blume/ directory. Astro then renders every page through a single catch-all route. That route imports Blume’s shipped components, the generated data, and your overrides. On each run, .blume/ regenerates, and only changed files are rewritten. As a result, hot reload stays fast during editing. The core theme ships no client framework JavaScript. Consequently, pages score well on Core Web Vitals by default. When you need full control, blume eject promotes the runtime into a standalone Astro app. That ejected project still depends on the blume package.
What it means
Developers using this tool avoid maintaining a separate documentation repository. They keep their content in a standard Markdown folder and run the CLI to generate the site. The process creates a hidden Astro project, which allows for fast hot reloading while editing. The resulting site is static HTML, optimised for performance without extra client-side JavaScript. If a team eventually requires full control over the runtime, they can eject the project into a standalone Astro application.
