feat(website): split the site, move docs to /docs, add a landing page

[localai-bot]

What this does

Splits localai.io into two sites: a marketing site at the root, and the documentation moved under /docs/.

The Hugo docs site has always been localai.io, which left nowhere to explain what LocalAI is or to show what the team builds. This adds that page, and gives the native engines, the APEX quantization work and a blog somewhere to live.

Docs move to /docs/

docs/ keeps its content tree and its Relearn theme and now builds with baseURL <root>/docs/. Its _index.md, which held a hand written marketing landing page, becomes a real documentation home.

Every previously published URL keeps working. GitHub Pages has no server side rewrites, so .github/ci/gen-redirects.sh walks the built docs output and leaves a meta refresh, a canonical link and a noindex at each old root path. 214 redirect stubs are generated. Two details that matter:

• It covers bare .html files, not only directory indexes, which is what keeps /gallery.html working.
• It never overwrites a path the marketing site already owns, so /, /engines/ and /blog/ survive.

docs/static/css/custom.css is deleted along with the old landing CSS. Relearn auto loads custom.css on every page and its only content was landing page styling plus a rule hiding the home h1, which would have hidden the new docs home title.

New site under website/

A second Hugo site with its own layouts and no external theme, so the marketing side does not have to fight Relearn's home rooted menu and asset pipeline. CI builds both and merges them into a single Pages artifact.

The design comes from the project logo rather than from nowhere: the navy of the triangle, the cyan of the llama, the purple of the speed bars, the off white of the wordmark. Those offset speed bars became the page's motion signature, used for the scroll progress bar, the nav underlines and every section head. Sora for display, Geist Mono for data, both self hosted.

The background renders a real depth-anything.cpp depth map as marching squares contour lines, and switches to a locate-anything.cpp style detection overlay while the engines section holds the viewport, with a scan line wiping between the two. Clicking deforms the depth field with a travelling wave, or runs a detection acquire sequence. Everything collapses to one static frame under prefers-reduced-motion.

Page order: hero, what LocalAI is, mission, senses, made with LocalAI, engines, APEX, cluster, models, nib, traction, blog, install.

Also included

• /engines/, driven entirely by website/data/engines.yaml, so adding an engine is one YAML edit rather than hand written HTML in two places
• /blog/ with five posts written from RELEASE_NOTES_v4.8.0.md, the APEX technical report, the parakeet.cpp benchmark suite and the engine READMEs
• website/static/install.sh, a real POSIX installer, since the site advertises it. Asset names were matched against actual releases with gh release view, and it was test run end to end
• website/static/install/kubernetes.yaml, with probes on the real /readyz and /healthz endpoints from core/http/routes/health.go
• A rule in .agents/preparing-a-release.md that release preparation now includes a blog post and demo clips

Sourcing

Every figure is derived from the repository or the GitHub API, none from memory: 48,042 stars, 4,314 forks, 224 contributors, 133 releases, 73 backend families, 1,585 gallery entries, 18 native engines, 201 APEX builds. The APEX table is the one from the technical report. Engine claims come from each engine's own README and benchmark suite. Community posts are real and linked, spanning 2023 to 2026.

Demo clips are re-encoded from the benchmark suites that run in CI on each engine. Twelve clips plus the presenter video, 2.1 MB of media in total.

Checking those figures against their sources turned up one error in the repo: README.md described voxtral-tts.c as speech to text. Its own README says Mistral Voxtral-4B-TTS, 20 preset voices, 24 kHz output. Corrected here, in the same place it appeared on the site.

Verification

Built with Hugo 0.146.3 extended, the version CI pins.

$ make site
gen-redirects: 214 redirect(s) written, 2 path(s) left to the marketing site

• /, /engines/, /blog/, all five posts, /docs/, /docs/features/text-generation/ all render
• /features/text-generation/ redirects to /docs/features/text-generation/
• / was not overwritten by the redirect generator
• Every asset reference on the landing and engines pages resolves
• install.sh passes sh -n and dash -n, and a real run installed, verified the checksum, then reported "nothing to do" on a second run
• kubernetes.yaml parses as five documents
• No em dashes anywhere in the new files

Notes for review

• vllm.cpp appears in a low key block marked as not yet announced. Merging this announces it regardless of the label. Say the word and it comes out.
• The italian-asr gallery card is a placeholder pending a repo or Hugging Face link.
• rf-detr.cpp has no clip because the repo was not available locally.
• Quotes from other people were trimmed for length. Worth a second read before this is public.
• kubectl apply --dry-run=client could not be run here, no reachable cluster.