Orbit MD 1.0 shipped on 8 October as a signed and notarised Mac app for Apple silicon. It’s built with Wails, a Go back end with a React and TypeScript front end, and uses the system’s git for storage and syncing.
Opening a site
Orbit clones with --filter=blob:none and a sparse checkout of the content folders, so a site with a long history or a large public/ folder downloads only what editors need. Clone addresses are checked first: ext:: and file:// transports and addresses that look like command-line options are refused, and the clone runs with protocol.ext.allow=never.
Reading the schema
For Astro, Orbit evaluates src/content.config.ts itself. esbuild strips the TypeScript and goja, a JavaScript engine written in Go, runs the result against a stand-in z, with a time limit. No Node install is needed and none of the site’s dependencies run. Each Zod type becomes a control: enums a dropdown, image() an image picker, objects a collapsible group.
Gatsby, Next.js and Nuxt sites declare their sections in a short content map in orbit.config.yaml, with fields from a JSON Schema, a list in the file, or inferred from existing pages.
Saving
An edit is merged into the YAML node tree read from disk instead of re-serialising a map, so key order, comments and quoting survive and changing one field changes one line. Pages are validated against the schema before anything is written, and errors come back keyed by field path, such as subsections[0].title.
Publishing
Saving commits and pushes to the preview branch in the background. Ask to publish records the request in orbit.requests.json on that branch, and Publish promotes the page’s files to the live branch. The host decides who can do that: protect the live branch, put approvers on its bypass list, and a refused push becomes a plain message in Orbit. Setting goLive: pullRequest opens a pull request instead, for teams that review on the host. Publishing for developers has the set-up.
A site in a sub-folder of a larger repository works too: git runs from the site’s folder with paths relative to it.
The release and its follow-ups are on GitHub, starting with 1.0.0.
For a less technical take on this, read Orbit MD 1.0.