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Reed Docs

Build output

Everything reed build writes, and what each part is for.

reed build --out dist produces a self-contained static site. Here is the whole tree for a two-page project:

dist/
  index.html            rendered page
  quickstart/index.html rendered page
  404.html              not-found page
  index.md              markdown mirror of index.html
  quickstart.md         markdown mirror of quickstart/index.html
  llms.txt              the site, as one file, for language models
  sitemap-index.xml     emitted when `site` is set
  sitemap-0.xml
  robots.txt            emitted when `site` is set
  _headers              response-header rules for static hosts
  _astro/               hashed CSS, JS and processed images
  _reed/                copied assets (favicon, OG image)
  pagefind/             the search index

HTML, and nothing behind it

Section titled “HTML, and nothing behind it”

There is no runtime, no backend, no client-side call to any Reed service. Search runs entirely in the browser against the pagefind/ index shipped alongside the pages. The site you get is the site you serve — if Reed disappears, it keeps working.

Markdown mirrors and llms.txt

Section titled “Markdown mirrors and llms.txt”

Every page is emitted twice: once as HTML for people, once as .md for machines that would rather not parse a rendered page. llms.txt is the whole site condensed into one plain-text file with an absolute link and description per page.

Three things point at llms.txt so it can actually be found: a <link rel="alternate"> in every page’s <head>, a comment line in robots.txt, and a footer link. The <head> link is the load-bearing one — it works whether or not you set site.

These are reed build outputs only. reed dev does not write them.

_headers

Section titled “_headers”

Static hosts need to be told that .md files are markdown and llms.txt is plain text; without it they are commonly served as application/octet-stream and download instead of render. Reed writes the rules for you. On Cloudflare Pages and Netlify the file is read from the root of the served directory — if you serve your site from a subdirectory, _headers still belongs at the root, not next to the pages.

Atomic replacement

Section titled “Atomic replacement”

build writes through a staged atomic replacement, so --out is never a mixed tree of old and new files, even if the build fails partway. It also refuses an --out that overlaps a build input, which would otherwise let a build consume its own output.

Bounded subprocesses

Section titled “Bounded subprocesses”

Two heavy steps have generous ceilings so that a hang becomes an error instead of a process nobody notices:

Variable Default Bounds
REED_BUILD_TIMEOUT_MS 1800000 (30 min) the site build
REED_INSTALL_TIMEOUT_MS 900000 (15 min) dependency install / prefetch

Set either to 0 to remove its ceiling. A negative or non-numeric value is rejected rather than ignored, so a typo cannot silently restore an unbounded build.