Cooklang Guides and Tutorials: From Zero to Working Recipes

Cooklang's surface area is small by design: a file format and a CLI. The depth comes from how you compose those pieces with the tools you already use. The guides in this hub take you from "I have a plain text file" to a working recipe pipeline, whether that means an Obsidian vault, a published website, or a parser embedded in your own app.

If you're new, start with the Plain Text Recipes Beginner's Guide and the Recipe Format Guide. These cover the syntax and the mental model. From there, pick your environment: the Complete CookCLI Guide for the command line, the Cooklang Obsidian Guide for note-takers, or the Cooklang Editor Setup for VS Code and others.

Bringing recipes from somewhere else? Migrating Recipes to Cooklang covers conversion from common formats. Publishing your collection? Publishing Your Recipe Collection as a Website and Cook Build Web get you from files to a live site.

For developers, the Cooklang Parser Integration Guide covers embedding parsers in your own applications, and the Markdown Recipe Template bridges Cooklang with Markdown-based note systems. Recipe Reports and Dashboards covers the cook report template system for custom outputs.

Two design notes about these guides: we try to keep each one runnable end-to-end — you should be able to follow the steps and have something working at the end, not just understand the concept. And we lean on real recipe files as examples wherever possible, because Cooklang's value is most obvious when you see the same recipe in different tools, not when you read about abstractions.

If you're stuck somewhere in the middle of one, the CookCLI guide is usually the right place to back up to.