DocPensieve
Going live
Lesson 3 of 3 — the last one of the course.
The site is a folder of HTML files. Putting it online is copying that folder somewhere — the work is in the two addresses you set first, and in the check that runs after.
The two addresses
They answer different questions, and mixing them up is the most common way to publish a broken site:
| Field | Answers | Looks like |
|---|---|---|
baseUrl | Where the site sits on its host | / or /my-course/ |
siteUrl | The full public address of the site | https://example.com/my-course |
siteUrl: 'https://example.com/my-course',
baseUrl: '/my-course/',baseUrl prefixes every internal link. Served from a subfolder without it,
every link points one level too high — the site works on your machine and
breaks the moment it is online. siteUrl is what lets the build write a
sitemap, canonical addresses and share previews.
npx docpensieve dev serves at the root, so a wrong baseUrl never shows there. Build and open
dist/ the way the host will: that is the only honest rehearsal.
Your turn: build and read it back
npx docpensieve build
npx docpensieve checkThe first writes the site. The second reads it back and exits with code 1 if a link leads nowhere — which is what makes it worth running in a pipeline: a build that succeeds says nothing about a link that does not.
check settles the second gauge. The third one is yours — nothing automates
reading your own pages.
A build that runs on its own
The shape of the pipeline matters more than its dialect. Every host writes it differently; each does the same four things:
On every push to the main branch
- 1. Install a recent runtime
- 2. Build the site
- 3. Read it back — a dead link stops the publication
- 4. Upload the folder to the host
- run: npx docpensieve build
# A successful build says nothing of a dead link.
- run: npx docpensieve checkA project created by init has no package.json, so npx takes the latest published version —
convenient at first, surprising later. Declare the tool in a package.json and run npm ci
before the build, and two builds a month apart produce the same site.
What the reader downloads
Check yourself
Your site is served from example.com/docs/ and every link 404s. What did you forget?
baseUrl: '/docs/'. Without it, links are written from the root of the domain
and point one level above the site.
Why run check in the pipeline when the build already passed?
Because they look at different things. The build compiles pages; check reads
the produced site and follows its links. A renamed page compiles perfectly and
leaves every link to it dead.
Live session
Next live session: 15 October. Bring the site you built during the course.
You made it
You have finished the course. Your site is built, checked, wearing your colours, and ready to put online.