Deployment

Rockgarden builds a static site into a single output directory (default: _site/). Any static hosting provider can serve it.

404 Pages

Rockgarden always generates a 404.html in the output root. Most hosts auto-detect this file — no extra config needed for Netlify, Vercel, or GitHub Pages.

You can override the default page by placing a 404.html in your site's _templates/ directory.

Provider-specific notes

Netlify: 404.html in the publish directory is detected automatically. No config required.

Vercel: 404.html in the output directory is detected automatically. If you use clean URLs (cleanUrls = true in rockgarden.toml), add a vercel.json to enable server-side clean URL handling:

{
  "cleanUrls": true
}

GitHub Pages: 404.html in the repository root (or docs/ folder if configured) is detected automatically.

Apache: Add to .htaccess in your document root:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

Nginx: Add to your server block:

error_page 404 /404.html;

Subdirectory Deployment

To deploy to a subdirectory (e.g., example.com/docs/), set base_url in rockgarden.toml:

[site]
base_url = "https://example.com/docs"

All generated URLs (internal links, media embeds, search index, sitemap) will include the base path prefix.

Clean URLs

By default, Rockgarden generates clean URLs (e.g., /about/ rather than /about.html). Each page is written as page/index.html. This works on most hosts without configuration.

To disable clean URLs, set in rockgarden.toml:

[site]
clean_urls = false

Dev Server

The built-in rockgarden serve command is a simple development preview server. It does not simulate 404 behavior — visit /404.html directly to preview the error page during development.