Cantare

A static songbook for singing meetups: open the site, search for the song being sung (by title, lyrics, artist, album, or tag), and sing along. Lyrics-only by default; flip on chords to get transposition, autoscroll, and chord diagrams.

Try the demo songbook — the fixtures in this repo, built and published alongside these docs.

Built with Astro (static site generation), ChordSheetJS (ChordPro parsing and rendering), and Pagefind (client-side search). Tooling: mise for tasks and tool versions, aube as the package manager.

Two ways to run one

There are two ways to run a songbook on cantare, from the same repo:

1. Use it as a package — your songbook is just content plus a config file; the engine is an installed dependency you update by re-installing. This is the path most people want.
2. Develop from source — clone the repo and edit templates and styles directly. This is the "eject" hatch for structural changes; it is simply the repo as you see it.

Getting started covers both.

Where to go next

• Getting started — install, build, pin the engine
• Configuration — branding, footer, theming, sub-paths
• Adding songs — the ChordPro subset cantare reads
• Deploying a songbook — hosting the built dist/
• How it works — the shape of the codebase
• Source on GitHub · Changelog

Licensing

The code is released under the MIT license. The example songs in songs/ are public-domain works (see the {copyright} directive in each file) kept as fixtures; real song collections are expected to live outside this repository, and their rights remain with their respective owners.