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;

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 rgdn 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.