+++ 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 --help`. ## init Creates the directory structure used by Zola at the given directory. ```bash $ 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. ```bash $ zola build ``` You can override the config `base_url` by passing a new URL to the `base-url` flag. ```bash $ 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. ```bash $ 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: ```bash $ 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. ```bash $ 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: ```bash $ 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`