Quickstart
From nothing to a deployable documentation site in five minutes.
1. Initialize
Section titled “1. Initialize”reed initThis writes a starter docs.json, a content/ directory, and a docs.schema.json
copy your editor uses for completion.
2. Prefetch
Section titled “2. Prefetch”reed prefetchThis 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
Section titled “3. Preview”reed devA live preview server that rebuilds as you edit.
4. Build
Section titled “4. Build”reed build --out distdist/ is the deployable static site: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and an inlined search
index. Nothing in it calls back to Reed.
5. Deploy
Section titled “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.