---
title: Quickstart
description: From nothing to a deployable documentation site in five minutes.
---

## 1. Initialize

```sh
reed init
```

This writes a starter `docs.json`, a `content/` directory, and a `docs.schema.json`
copy your editor uses for completion.

## 2. Prefetch

```sh
reed prefetch
```

This is the one step that needs network access. It populates a local, pinned dependency
store on this machine. Run it once — after that, `check`, `dev` and `build` all succeed
with no network at all.

`reed prefetch` needs a Corepack-resolvable `pnpm`. Corepack ships with Node 16.9 and
later, but Node 25 and newer no longer bundle it by default; on such a machine, enable
it first with `corepack enable pnpm`.

## 3. Preview

```sh
reed dev
```

A live preview server that rebuilds as you edit.

## 4. Build

```sh
reed build --out dist
```

`dist/` is the deployable static site: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and an inlined search
index. Nothing in it calls back to Reed.

## 5. Deploy

Upload `dist/` to any static host — Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel, S3 behind a CDN,
or an nginx root. There is no Reed-specific deployment step, because there is no Reed
runtime to deploy.

One caveat if you set `base` in `docs.json`: the mount path must physically exist in the
served file tree. A site with `base: "/docs"` emits links pointing at `/docs/...`, so the
built files have to be served from a `docs/` directory, not from the root of your asset
directory.