Source

The default theme for Ghost. This is the latest development version of Source! If you're just looking to download the latest release, head over to the releases page.

 

First time using a Ghost theme?

Ghost uses a simple templating language called Handlebars for its themes.

This theme has lots of code comments to help explain what's going on just by reading the code. Once you feel comfortable with how everything works, we also have full theme API documentation which explains every possible Handlebars helper and template.

The main files are:

• default.hbs - The parent template file, which includes your global header/footer
• home.hbs - The homepage
• index.hbs - The main template to generate a list of posts
• post.hbs - The template used to render individual posts
• page.hbs - Used for individual pages
• tag.hbs - Used for tag archives, eg. "all posts tagged with news"
• author.hbs - Used for author archives, eg. "all posts written by Jamie"

One neat trick is that you can also create custom one-off templates by adding the slug of a page to a template file. For example:

• page-about.hbs - Custom template for an /about/ page
• tag-news.hbs - Custom template for /tag/news/ archive
• author-ali.hbs - Custom template for /author/ali/ archive

Development

Source styles are compiled using Gulp/PostCSS to polyfill future CSS spec. You'll need Node and pnpm. After that, from the theme's root directory:

# install dependencies
pnpm install

# run development server
pnpm dev

Now you can edit /assets/css/ files, which will be compiled to /assets/built/ automatically.

The zip Gulp task packages the theme files into dist/<theme-name>.zip, which you can then upload to your site.

# create .zip file
pnpm zip

Publishing a release

Releases are shipped from an up-to-date, clean main branch in two steps. Before starting, configure GST_TOKEN with a GitHub token that can create releases in TryGhost/Source.

First bump the version. This updates package.json, then creates a commit and annotated v<version> git tag:

# pick one of: patch | minor | major (or an explicit version, e.g. 1.8.0)
pnpm version minor

Then run ship:

pnpm ship

pnpm ship:

1. Builds the theme zip and runs GScan.
2. Refuses to continue if the working tree is not clean after the build.
3. Pushes the version commit and tag.
4. Prompts for the minimum compatible Ghost version and creates a draft GitHub release with the generated changelog.

Review and publish the draft GitHub release after the command completes. The pushed theme tag, rather than the GitHub release, is what the next Ghost release uses when updating its bundled Source theme.

Note

pnpm version requires an explicit version or bump type. Run it before pnpm ship; the ship command does not perform the bump itself.

PostCSS Features Used

• Autoprefixer - Don't worry about writing browser prefixes of any kind, it's all done automatically with support for the latest 2 major versions of every browser.

SVG Icons

Source uses inline SVG icons, included via Handlebars partials. You can find all icons inside /partials/icons. To use an icon just include the name of the relevant file, eg. To include the SVG icon in /partials/icons/rss.hbs - use {{> "icons/rss"}}.

You can add your own SVG icons in the same manner.

Translations

Please see @TryGhost/Themes/theme-translations/README.md for how to build, edit, or contribute translations.

Copyright & License

Copyright (c) 2013-2026 Ghost Foundation - Released under the MIT license.