CLI

Methanol includes a dedicated Command-line Interface (CLI) designed to streamline development, execution of static builds, and local previews.

Core Commands

Quick start with npx (recommended):

npx methanol dev      # Initialize the development server
npx methanol build    # Execute production build to the dist/ directory
npx methanol serve    # Preview the production build locally

For improved performance and faster startup times, consider a global installation:

npm install methanol -g
methanol dev

The input and output paths can be provided as positional arguments (order is significant):

npx methanol build ./pages ./dist

In dev mode, only the input argument is utilized:

npx methanol dev ./pages

For serve/preview, the first positional argument is treated as the output directory:

npx methanol serve ./dist

Flag Reference

• --input, -i: Specifies the source directory (overrides the default pages/).
• --components: Specifies the components directory (overrides the default components/).
• --assets: Specifies the static assets directory (overrides the default public/).
• --output, -o: Specifies the build destination (overrides the default dist/).
• --config, -c: Defines the path to a custom configuration file.
• --theme: Overrides the theme configuration. When a string is provided, Methanol first attempts to resolve it as a built-in theme (e.g., default, blog). If not found, it searches for a package named methanol-theme-xxx (where xxx is the provided string). For local themes, import them in methanol.config.* and set theme to the imported theme object/factory.
• --site-name: Overrides the site title defined in configuration.
• --owner: Overrides the site owner (site.owner).
• --base: Temporarily overrides site.base for the current execution (ignored in dev mode).
• --port: Sets the port for the development and preview servers (default: 5173).
• --host: Binds the server to a specific host (using --host without a value binds to all interfaces).
• --intermediate-dir: Directory for intermediate HTML output (build only).
• --emit-intermediate: Enables the output of intermediate HTML to build/ (build only).
• --highlight/--no-highlight: Controls syntax highlighting.
• --jobs, -j: Sets the build worker thread count (0 auto scales with page count).
• --search/--no-search: Controls Pagefind search indexing.
• --rss/--no-rss: Controls RSS/Atom feed generation.
• --atom/--no-atom: Outputs Atom when enabled (--rss is implied).
• --pwa/--no-pwa: Controls PWA support.
• -v, --verbose: Enables detailed logging, including Vite and Pagefind output during the build process.

Syntax highlighting is enabled by default and can be disabled per-execution via --no-highlight.

Execution via Node

node node_modules/methanol/bin/methanol.js dev