Build the Site

Building assembles your Markdown, navigation, and theme into a static site: plain HTML, CSS, and a few site files, with no server-side code. The result can be hosted anywhere static files are served.

Run a build

Choose Tools → Codocation → Build HTML Site (the same actions are available on the main toolbar). The build runs in the background and reports the number of pages written and the output directory when it finishes.

What ends up in the output

  • One HTML file per published page, styled by codocation.css.
  • search-index.json and search-runtime.js: the built-in client-side search. It works on the published site with no external service.
  • sitemap.xml and llms.txt for crawlers and language models.
  • Your referenced images and attachments, copied under the assets directory.

Output settings

The "Output" tab of the "Site & Export" tool window controls the build:

  • "Output directory": where the site is written. The default is dist.
  • "Clean URLs (drop .html)": publish pages as /getting-started/ instead of /getting-started.html.

The same values live under build: in codocation.yml:

build:
  output: dist
  cleanUrls: true
  assetsDir: images

When a build refuses to run

Two guards keep a broken site from being published:

  • The site must have a home page: either a page marked as home in the navigation tree, or an index.md at the top level. Without one, the site root would be an empty URL, and the build stops with an error that names the missing piece.
  • Validation findings with the "error" severity (broken page references in the navigation tree, for example) also stop the build. Fix them in the "Problems" tool window, or adjust severities in error-registry.yml if a rule should not block you.

Export as ZIP

Tools → Codocation → Export ZIP runs the same build and packages the output into a single .zip archive: convenient for handing the site to a hosting pipeline that expects an upload.