Publishing

Publishing takes your project from the editor to a live URL. The flow is always the same: preview your work, then publish. Because a Meno project is a normal Astro codebase, you have two paths to live — publish to Meno's hosting in one click, or deploy the built .astro site yourself.

Preview before you publish

While you edit, the canvas shows a live render of your .astro pages. Switch between desktop, tablet, and mobile breakpoints to check responsive styles, and toggle locales to confirm each i18n({...}) value reads correctly.

Preview reflects your latest edits, including unpublished CMS drafts, so you can see exactly what will go live before you commit to it. When the preview looks right, publish.

Drafts and published content

Page and component edits in the editor are written straight to your .astro files — those are the source of truth, and saving them is what makes them part of the project.

CMS content works a little differently, because content authors often want to stage changes without touching the live site. Each CMS item lives as a JSON file under src/content/<collection>/. An unpublished edit is saved as a sibling <name>.draft.json file; the published item is the plain <name>.json next to it. Preview renders the draft, while the live build renders the published file.

Publishing a collection promotes each draft: <name>.draft.json replaces <name>.json and the draft sibling is removed. From that point the live site shows the new content on its next build. See CMS for how items, drafts, and schemas fit together.

Publish to Meno hosting

The fastest path is Meno's built-in hosting. From the Publish tab, click publish — Meno builds your project with astro build and serves the static output at a Meno URL. No accounts, build commands, or config to manage.

Every publish is a fresh build, so newly promoted CMS content and any page or component edits appear together. This is the recommended path while you iterate.

Deploy the site yourself

Because the project is a standard Astro repo, you can also build and host it anywhere. Connect the project to GitHub (see GitHub) and push, then point a static host at the repo for Git-based deploys that rebuild on every push.

astro build emits a plain static site to dist/ that runs on Netlify, Cloudflare, Vercel, GitHub Pages, or any file host. The full walkthrough — build command, provider settings, redirects, and headers — lives in Deployment. Self-hosting gives you control over the build pipeline and domain; Meno hosting trades that for one-click simplicity.

Custom domains and siteUrl

Set siteUrl in [project.config.json](/docs/project-config) to your production URL:

{
  "siteUrl": "https://example.com"
}

siteUrl is the canonical address of your site. The build uses it to generate sitemap.xml, robots.txt, and absolute URLs, so set it before you go live regardless of where you host.

On Meno hosting, attach a custom domain from the Publish tab and follow the DNS instructions. If you deploy yourself, configure the domain on your host (Netlify, Cloudflare, or Vercel) — see Deployment for provider-specific steps.

Once your project is live, keep editing as usual: each save updates the .astro files, and your next publish or push rebuilds and ships the changes.