Command line

Folia has two commands, folia build and folia serve, and no others: there is no new, init, clean or watch. folia --version prints the version, and --help on the program or on a command prints its options.

folia build --dest DIR [options]
folia serve [options]

folia build

Builds the whole site into a directory. This is the command you publish with; see Build and deploy.

Option	Default	What
--site PATH	.	The site: a git repository
--config PATH	<site>/_folia/folia.toml	The configuration
--dest PATH	required	Where to write the site: a directory outside the site, absent, empty, or written by an earlier build
--future	off	Also build documents dated after the build. The output is a preview
--unpublished	off	Also build documents whose front matter says published: false. The output is a preview
--at TIME	now	Build as of this moment, an RFC 3339 timestamp with a time and an offset, such as 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

--future and --unpublished are explained in Drafts and scheduling, and --at there too. They are flags, not configuration keys: a future, unpublished or at key in folia.toml is an error.

What it prints

While it builds, Folia prints warnings (a broken wiki-link) and skipped: lines for any document it does not support yet, each with the reason. Then comes the summary on stdout:

Built 18 pages, 1 redirect stubs, 16 generated files and 2 static files into /tmp/out.

The counts are what Folia wrote: pages rendered from your content, a stub for each redirect_from URL, files it generated itself (feeds, sitemap, robots.txt, search data, the garden's graph) and files copied as they are.

When Folia plans an output it has no generator for, the summary ends with "; N planned outputs are not built yet" (it counts them). A normal build has none, so the line does not print.

A preview build adds PREVIEW BUILD (...): not for publishing. to the summary, and a warning: line says the same.

Exit status

Status	Meaning	Output
0	The site was built into --dest. Warnings and skipped: documents do not change it	warnings and skips on stderr, then the summary on stdout
1	The build failed: planning, a missing or failing template, a render error, an unknown author, a destination Folia refuses, or a write error. Nothing was written; --dest is as it was	every problem on stderr, then The build failed with N problems; nothing was written, …
2	Usage or configuration error: an unknown command or option, a missing --dest, a bad --at, a configuration that cannot be read or has an unknown key	the error on stderr

A run that exits 0 may have skipped documents. A script that must not publish a partial site should check stderr for skipped:.

folia serve

Builds the site, serves it, and builds again when a file changes. See Preview while you write for how it behaves.

Option	Default	What
--site PATH	.	The site
--config PATH	<site>/_folia/folia.toml	The configuration, read again on every build
--dest PATH	folia/serve/<site name>-<hash> in your cache directory	Where to build: a directory outside the site, absent, empty or written by folia serve (never one folia build wrote)
--host ADDRESS	127.0.0.1	The address to listen on. Any but a loopback address may let other machines see the site
--port PORT	4000	The port to listen on; 0 picks a free one, and the address is printed
--future	off	As for build
--unpublished	off	As for build

There is no --at: every rebuild is as of its own moment.

folia serve runs until you stop it with Ctrl+C. It exits with status 2 before serving anything if the site or configuration cannot be read, the destination is refused, the address cannot be listened on or the sources cannot be watched. A build that fails later is not an exit: the last good site stays up.

Environment

Variable	What
FOLIA_SASS	The Dart Sass program, when it is not sass on PATH (see Stylesheets)
XDG_CACHE_HOME	Where folia serve keeps its default destination, if set (else ~/.cache)