Publish a public site

The review app is a dev-local tool — but the docs it renders often deserve a public home. build --public produces a pure-static, read-only artifact made for that:

notabene build --public --site https://you.github.io --base /your-repo --out ./_site

This very site is built that way — notabene’s docs, rendered and published by notabene.

What’s in, what’s out

• Everything interactive is gone — structurally. No comment UI, no identity prompt, no /comments / /review / /journal, no API, and nothing from the .notabene store. The routes are not gated; they are not built.
• What remains is the full reading experience: nav, search, Mermaid + image lightbox, dark mode, i18n (per-locale pages, switcher, hreflang), print/PDF routes, 404.
• Born agent-readable. Every page ships a Markdown twin at <page>/index.md (advertised via <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown">), the site ships /llms.txt (a machine index of every page, per locale) and /llms-full.txt (the whole doc as one Markdown document in reading order), plus robots.txt, a sitemap, canonical URLs, OpenGraph/Twitter meta and JSON-LD. Try it here: /llms.txt.

Full-text search (optional)

The public site inherits the built-in search as-is. Install Pagefind as a dev dependency and build --public upgrades it to static full-text search:

npm i -D pagefind

The build indexes the final artifact: per-language stemming (a /fr/ visitor searches a French index with French word forms), highlighted excerpts under each result, and a payload that stays small as the docs grow — the browser fetches only the index chunks a query needs. Zero configuration, same search box. Not installed → the public site keeps the built-in JSON search. And private content cannot leak into the index: indexing runs on the artifact, where scoped pages don’t exist.

The same dependency upgrades the notabene dev review app too: its index is built live from your Markdown sources and refreshed as they change — no build involved. Two dev-specific differences: the dev site (and so its index) includes your private pages, and per-section deep results (heading anchors) are public-only.

Where next

• Configuring publish — site, base, exclude, with examples.
• Keep content private — space / sub-tree / page scoping.
• Domain managed server-side — omit site, stay origin-agnostic.
• Deploy via GitHub Pages — the ready-made workflow.

The dev loop is untouched: notabene dev and plain notabene build behave exactly as before — publishing is opt-in, per build.