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lbliii 4 min read 701 words Updated 9 days ago

Bengal 0.5.0

Link integrity end to end plus a tighter authoring loop — preview drafts locally, detect broken internal links reliably, and apply fixes for typo, moved-page, and stale-anchor links, with broader autodoc and typed-collection migrations.

Key theme: Link integrity end to end, plus a tighter authoring loop. Bengal 0.5.0 closes the loop on broken internal links — it now detects them reliably and fixes them for you — and adds a local draft-preview workflow so you can iterate on unpublished pages before they ship. Autodoc reaches one more CLI framework, typed collections gain a migration hook, and the dev server gets a faster static path. This is a quality and capability release, not a performance release — proportional warm rebuilds land in 0.6.

Highlights

Preview drafts locally

Mark a pagedraft: true and it stays out of your published site by default. Now you can see it while you work: run bengal serve --drafts or bengal build --drafts, or set drafts = true under [build], and Bengal renders draft pages so you can preview unpublished content locally. Without the flag, drafts stay hidden — production output is unchanged (#488).

Bengal now handles broken internal links end to end:

  • Detected reliably. The internal link checker resolves relative links such as../other/against the page that references them and reports the broken ones, instead of silently passing them (#489). And autodoc no longer turns illustrative cross-reference and directive examples in docstrings into live (and often broken) links, so generated API pages — and the broken-link health check — stay clean (#485).
  • Fixed for you.bengal fix now suggests and applies fixes for broken internal links: correcting a typo in a page path, re-pointing a link to a page that moved, and repairing a stale #anchor. Link rewrites are offered as confirm-before-apply fixes, so you review each one before it touches your source (#491).

Broader autodoc: argparse CLIs

Autodoc CLI extraction now supports argparse alongside Click and Typer. Point it at anargparse.ArgumentParser with framework="argparse"and it documents subcommands, positional arguments, and options the same way (#493).

Typed-collection migrations

define_collection(..., transform=callable)runs your callable on each record's frontmatter before schema validation. You can normalize legacy field names during a migration without rewriting source files first (#492).

Dev server: faster static path

Dev-server assets now serve through the fast static path, and the hidden-buffer 404 workaround is removed. This requires bengal-pounce 0.8.0 or newer (#400).

Honest claims

  • bengal build --memory-optimizedis now labeled experimental, and its help text and docs no longer promise a fixed memory saving — measure peak memory with and without the flag on your own site before relying on it (#487).
  • The plugin documentation now lists the extension points that are actually wired, instead of over-claiming (#503).

Added

  • Local draft preview:bengal serve --drafts / bengal build --drafts (or drafts = true under [build]); drafts stay hidden by default (#488).
  • bengal fixsuggests and applies fixes for broken internal links — typo, moved-page, and stale-anchor corrections, confirm-before-apply (#491).
  • define_collection(..., transform=callable)normalizes records before schema validation (#492).
  • Autodoc CLI extraction supports argparse alongside Click and Typer (#493).

Changed

  • Dev-server assets serve through the fast static path; the hidden-buffer 404 workaround is removed (requires bengal-pounce 0.8.0+) (#400).
  • bengal build --memory-optimizedis labeled experimental, with no promised memory saving (#487).

Fixed

  • The internal link checker resolves relative links against the referencing page and reports broken ones, instead of silently passing them (#489).
  • Autodoc no longer turns docstring cross-reference and directive examples into live (often broken) links, so generated API pages and the broken-link health check stay clean (#485).

Upgrading

BASH
uv pip install --upgrade bengal
# or
pip install --upgrade bengal

A few things to know:

  • Drafts are opt-in to preview. Pages markeddraft: true are still hidden from a normal build; pass --drafts (or set drafts = true under [build]) to render them.
  • The dev-server fast static path needs bengal-pounce 0.8.0 or newer. Upgrade bengal-pounce alongside Bengal.
  • --memory-optimizedis experimental. It no longer promises a fixed memory saving; measure peak memory on your own site before relying on it.
  • Not a performance release. Proportional warm rebuilds are planned for 0.6; 0.5.0 focuses on link integrity and the authoring loop.