Meet Bark: your new favorite way to serve documentation. If you have a folder full of Markdown files, you have a beautiful, searchable documentation site ready to go.

Built on the modern .NET stack, Bark is designed for those who want a powerful, self-hosted solution without being tethered to the traditional Microsoft ecosystem.

Pick whichever path fits your environment. Docker is the fastest way to get running.

Prebuilt images are published to GHCR on every tagged release. Create a docker-compose.yml file with the following content:

services:
  bark:
    image: ghcr.io/melosso/bark:latest
    container_name: bark
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - ./docs:/app/docs

Mount your own docs/ folder containing your .md files and optional config.json. When that is done, run docker compose up -d to start the container and browse to http://localhost:8080.

For those running Windows, follow the following steps:

1. Download the latest *-Windows_x64.zip from Releases.
2. Extract it to your site folder (e.g. C:\inetpub\bark).
3. In IIS, create a site (or app) pointing at that folder, with the No Managed Code .NET CLR version.
4. The zip already includes a web.config wired for in-process hosting. No manual edits needed.
5. Make sure the .NET 10 Hosting Bundle is installed on the server (gives IIS the ASP.NET Core Module).
6. Start the site and browse to it.

A Linux x64 self-contained-runtime build (*-Linux_x64.zip) is published alongside each release. See Option C: Linux release zip for installation instructions.

Drop Markdown files into docs/. Folder structure becomes the navigation tree; index.md becomes a section's landing page.

---
title: Installation
description: Get Bark running locally
---

# Installation

You can write your own documentation right here!

Front attributes such as title, description are entirely optional. Bark falls back to the filename.

Drop a docs/config.json to set brand text, navigation, and social links:

{
  "brand": "Bark",
  "nav": [
    {
      "title": "Getting Started",
      "items": [
        { "title": "Installation", "path": "getting-started/installation" }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

When nav is present it replaces the auto-generated folder-based navigation. Both content and config are hot-reloaded. No restart needed.

Theme overrides, such as CSS variables, dark mode and custom CSS, are handled through environment variables or appsettings.json instead.

Licensed under the AGPL 3.0 license. See LICENSE for details.