Deployment#

A Kiln build produces a plain directory of static files. There’s no server runtime, so you can host it anywhere that serves static content.

What a build produces#

site/
├── index.html                     # default language at the root
├── guides/configuration/index.html
├── de/                            # other languages under /<locale>/
│   ├── index.html
│   └── guides/configuration/index.html
├── search/search_index.json       # per-language search index
├── 404.html                       # per-language error pages
├── index.md                       # raw-markdown copy of each page
├── _kiln/                         # bundled theme assets (css/js)
├── sitemap.xml
├── robots.txt
├── llms.txt                       # AI/agent index
├── llms-full.txt
└── …                              # your content assets, copied as-is

URLs are “pretty” (directory-style): /guides/configuration/ rather than /guides/configuration.html.

Build for production#

kiln build --release

…or call the library directly in your executable. Either way, the output lands in site/ (by convention).

Hosting#

Host	How
GitHub Pages	Build in CI, push `site/` to the `gh-pages` branch (or use the Pages action with the artifact).
Netlify	Build command runs your executable; publish directory is `site`.
Cloudflare Pages	Same — build command + `site` output directory.
Any static host / S3 / nginx	Upload the contents of `site/`.

Continuous deployment#

A typical CI job:

swift run Docs          # or: kiln build --release
# deploy the ./site directory with your host's CLI/action

Fail on broken links in CI

Build with linkChecking: .error (see Link Checking) so a broken internal link fails the deploy instead of shipping.

Custom domain & canonical URL#

Set url on your KilnSite to your final domain before deploying — it’s used for canonical URLs, sitemap.xml, OpenGraph tags, and hreflang alternates. Configure the domain itself with your host (a CNAME for GitHub Pages, the dashboard for Netlify/Cloudflare).