Basic Usage

Learn the basic commands to build and deploy your Orchid static site


Orchid is a static site generator with a focus on building really great documentation sites. Its main job is to take content from a variety of sources (such as Markdown or comments in your project's code), allow a series of plugins to transform that content into pages, and then render those pages to files. From there, you are free to deploy these files to any webserver you'd like, and Orchid can help you with that too!

Whether you run Orchid from Gradle, Maven, or a kscript, you'll have the following tasks available to you:

Build

A build in Orchid will take your content and configurations, and generate a site in your configured output directory. Simple as that.

Example Usage

./gradlew orchidBuild
./mvnw orchid:build
./sbtw orchidBuild
kscript ./orchid.kts build

Serve

Running Orchid in serve mode will first build your site, but then also start a local webserver for you to easily preview it. In addition, it will watch your content directory for changes and rebuild with each change. And if you have the OrchidPluginDocs plugin installed, you'll also be able to visit an admin panel at /admin and automatically get the most up-to-date documentation for your installed plugins delivered right to you!

Example Usage

./gradlew orchidServe
./mvnw orchid:serve
./sbtw orchidServe
kscript ./orchid.kts serve

Deploy

Once you're happy with your site, it's time to take it live! The deploy task will build your site and then publish it to a variety of destinations, such as Netlify or GitHub Pages, but also has some other goodies like uploading release notes to GitHub Releases.

Example Usage

./gradlew orchidDeploy
./mvnw orchid:deploy
./sbtw orchidDeploy
kscript ./orchid.kts deploy

Run Task

In addition to the commands above, you can pass the name of an Orchid task directly through the CLI as an additional runTask parameter. Available commands are build, deploy, and serve.

Example Usage

./gradlew orchidRun -PorchidRunTask=build
./mvnw orchid:run -Dorchid.runTask=build
./sbtw -Dorchid.runTask=build orchidRun
kscript ./orchid.kts build