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+++ 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 base_path by passing a new directory to the base-path flag. If no base-path flag
is provided, zola defaults to your current working directory. This is useful if your zola project is located in
a different directory from where you're executing zola from.
$ zola build --base-path /path/to/zola/site
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 --interface 0.0.0.0 --port 2000 --base-path mysite/ --output-dir mysite/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