Ship - Bengal

You have a site working — now configure builds, validate quality, optimize performance, and ship to production.

Note

Do I need this? Yes for operators and site owners tuning production builds, SEO, deployment, or troubleshooting. New to Bengal? Start with Get Started. Writing content? See Build Sites.

Key Terms (7)

Child Cards: A directive ({child-cards}) that automatically creates a card grid from a section's child pages and subsections.
Breadcrumbs: A directive ({breadcrumbs}) that generates hierarchical navigation showing the current page's location in the site structure.
Siblings: A directive ({siblings}) that lists pages at the same level as the current page within their shared parent section.
Prev/Next: A directive ({prev-next}) that generates previous/next navigation links within a section.

Show 3 more terms

Related: A directive ({related}) that lists pages with matching tags.
Health Check: Bengal's validation command (bengal check) that scans content, links, directives, and templates for errors before you ship.
Versioned Documentation: Serving multiple doc versions from one site — latest at/docs/page/ and older releases at /docs/{version}/page/.

Configuration

Configuring Bengal with bengal.toml

Performance

Optimize Bengal build performance

Deployment

Deploy your Bengal site to production

Troubleshooting

Common issues and how to resolve them

Validation

Content validation and health checks

Build Pipeline

flowchart LR subgraph Input A[Content] B[Config] C[Theme] end subgraph Build D[Discovery] E[Content] F[Rendering] G[Post-Process] end subgraph Output H[public/] end A --> D B --> D D --> E C --> F E --> F F --> G G --> H

Quick Reference

I want to...	Go to...
Configure my site	Configuration
Improve metadata, sitemap, feeds, and social sharing	SEO & Discovery
Add "Connect to IDE" button for Cursor MCP	Connect to IDE
Build OSS vs Enterprise variants	Multi-Variant Builds
Build for production	CLI Reference
Speed up builds	Performance
Generate JSON/LLM output	Output Formats
Understand DX hints (Docker, WSL, K8s)	DX Hints
Deploy my site	Deployment
Fix build errors	Troubleshooting
Validate links and content	Validation

Essential Commands

BASH

# Development server with live reload
bengal serve                # or: bengal s

# Build, then preview completed output with static serving semantics
bengal preview

# Production build (recommended for deployment)
bengal build --environment production --strict

# Fast CI build (parallel, quiet output)
bengal build --fast --environment production

# Validate content before building
bengal check                # or: bengal v

# Clean cache and rebuild from scratch
bengal clean --cache && bengal build

bengal servekeeps HTML, markdown negotiation, custom 404 pages, and live reload under Bengal's dev-server path. Static assets such as CSS, JavaScript, images, fonts, media, PDFs, and WebAssembly are served through Pounce's static file handler, so browsers get ETags,304 Not Modifiedrevalidation, byte-range responses, and precompressed.gz/.zstvariants when those files exist.

bengal previewruns a complete build first and then serves the generated output directory read-only through Pounce static handling. It does not watch files, inject live reload, rewrite local development URLs, or serve pending generated artifacts; it is the local check for what a static host will receive.

In This Section

Configuration Configuring Bengal with bengal.toml 5 pages

Performance Optimize Bengal build performance 3 pages

Deployment Deploy your Bengal site to production 1 page

Troubleshooting Common issues and how to resolve them 2 pages

Validation Content validation and health checks 3 pages

AI-Native Output How Bengal makes your documentation discoverable, navigable, and policy-compliant for AI agents and RAG pipelines

Connect to IDE (Cursor MCP) Add a one-click "Connect to IDE" button so readers can add your docs as an MCP server in Cursor

DX Hints Contextual tips for Docker, WSL, Kubernetes, and development environments

Output Formats Generate JSON, LLM-ready text, and other output formats for search and AI discovery

SEO & Discovery Use Bengal's built-in metadata, sitemap, feeds, social cards, content signals, and output formats to make sites easier to discover