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

+++ title = “CLI usage” weight = 2 +++

Zola only has 3 commands: init, build and serve.

You can view the help of the whole program by running zola --help and the command help by running zola <cmd> --help.

init

Creates the directory structure used by Zola at the given directory.

$ zola init my_site

will create a new folder named my_site and the files/folders needed by zola.

build

This will build the whole site in the public directory after deleting it.

$ 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 a other value to the output-dir flag.

$ zola build --output-dir $DOCUMENT_ROOT

You can also point to another config file than config.toml like so - the position of the config option is important:

$ zola --config config.staging.toml build

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 -u/--base-url, for example if you are running zola in a Docker container.

In the event you don't want zola to run a local webserver, you can use the --watch-only flag.

Before starting, it will delete the public directory to ensure it starts 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 --watch-only

The serve command will watch all your content and will provide live reload, without hard refresh if possible.

Zola does a best-effort to live reload but some changes cannot be handled automatically. If you fail to see your change or get a weird error, try to restart zola serve.

You can also point to another config file than config.toml like so - the position of the config option is important:

$ zola --config config.staging.toml serve

Colored output

Any of the three commands will emit colored output if your terminal supports it.

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

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

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

Should you want to force the use of colors, you can set the following environment variable:

• CLICOLOR_FORCE=1