zola/docs/content/documentation/getting-started/cli-usage.md

+++ title = "CLI usage" weight = 15 +++

Zola only has 4 commands: init, build, serve and check.

You can view the help for the whole program by running zola --help and that for a specific command by running zola <cmd> --help.

init

Creates the directory structure used by Zola at the given directory after asking a few basic configuration questions. Any choices made during these prompts can be easily changed by modifying config.toml.

$ zola init my_site
$ zola init

If the my_site directory already exists, Zola will only populate it if it contains only hidden files (dotfiles are ignored). If no my_site argument is passed, Zola will try to populate the current directory.

In case you want to attempt to populate a non-empty directory and are brave, you can use zola init --force. Note that this will not overwrite existing folders or files; in those cases you will get a File exists (os error 17) error or similar.

You can initialize a git repository and a Zola site directly from within a new folder:

$ git init
$ zola init

build

This will build the whole site in the public directory (if this directory already exists, it is deleted).

$ zola build

You can override the config base_url by passing a new URL to the base-url flag.

$ zola build --base-url $DEPLOY_URL

This is useful for example when you want to deploy previews of a site to a dynamic URL, such as Netlify deploy previews.

You can override the default output directory public by passing another value to the output-dir flag (if this directory already exists, the user will be prompted whether to replace the folder).

$ zola build --output-dir $DOCUMENT_ROOT

You can point to a config file other than config.toml like so (note that the position of the config option is important):

$ zola --config config.staging.toml build

You can also process a project from a different directory with the root flag. If building a project 'out-of-tree' with the root flag, you may want to combine it with the output-dir flag. (Note that like config, the position is important):

$ zola --root /path/to/project build

By default, drafts are not loaded. If you wish to include them, pass the --drafts flag.

serve

This will build and serve the site using a local server. You can also specify the interface/port combination to use if you want something different than the default (127.0.0.1:1111).

You can also specify different addresses for the interface and base_url using --interface and -u/--base-url, respectively, if for example you are running Zola in a Docker container.

By default, devices from the local network won't be able to access the served pages. This may be of importance when you want to test page interaction and layout on your mobile device or tablet. If you set the interface to 0.0.0.0 however, devices from your local network will be able to access the served pages by requesting the local ip-address of the machine serving the pages and port used.

In order to have everything work correctly, you might also have to alter the base-url flag to your local ip.

Use the --open flag to automatically open the locally hosted instance in your web browser.

Before starting, Zola will delete the output directory (by default public in project root) to start from a clean slate.

$ zola serve
$ zola serve --port 2000
$ zola serve --interface 0.0.0.0
$ zola serve --interface 0.0.0.0 --port 2000
$ zola serve --interface 0.0.0.0 --base-url 127.0.0.1
$ zola serve --interface 0.0.0.0 --port 2000 --output-dir www/public
$ zola serve --open

The serve command will watch all your content and provide live reload without a hard refresh if possible. If you are using WSL2 on Windows, make sure to store the website on the WSL file system.

Some changes cannot be handled automatically and thus live reload may not always work. If you fail to see your change or get an error, try restarting zola serve.

You can also point to a config file other than config.toml like so (note that the position of the config option is important):

$ zola --config config.staging.toml serve

By default, drafts are not loaded. If you wish to include them, pass the --drafts flag.

check

The check subcommand will try to build all pages just like the build command would, but without writing any of the results to disk. Additionally, it will also check all external links in Markdown files by trying to fetch them (links in the template files are not checked).

By default, drafts are not loaded. If you wish to include them, pass the --drafts flag.

Colored output

Colored output is used if your terminal supports it.

Note: coloring is automatically disabled when the output is redirected to a pipe or a file (i.e., when the standard output is not a TTY).

You can disable this behavior by exporting one of the following two environment variables:

• NO_COLOR (the value does not matter)
• CLICOLOR=0

To force the use of colors, you can set the following environment variable:

• CLICOLOR_FORCE=1