Site Management & Deployment

Guide to generating, managing, and deploying your StaticForge site.

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Site Management & Deployment

Building your site shouldn't be a chore. StaticForge gives you powerful tools to generate your pages locally and seamless ways to push them to the world.

Whether you are iterating on a single blog post or launching a major update, we've got you covered.

Generating Your Site

At its heart, StaticForge is a compiler. It takes your raw content and templates and turns them into a beautiful, static website.

The Heavy Lifter: site:render

When you're ready to see your whole site, this is the command you'll reach for. It processes everything: markdown files, assets, template logic, and more.

# Build everything
php vendor/bin/staticforge.php site:render

Need a fresh start? Sometimes caches get stale or old files linger. Use the --clean flag to wipe the slate clean before rebuilding. This is especially useful for production builds.

php vendor/bin/staticforge.php site:render --clean

Testing a new look? If you're experimenting with different templates, you can switch them on the fly without changing your configuration files.

php vendor/bin/staticforge.php site:render --template=experimental-template

Going Live

So you've built a site you're proud of. Now what?

StaticForge includes a built-in "Smart Uploader." It's not just a dumb file copy; it understands your site.

Why not just use FileZilla?

You certainly can! But site:upload does three critical things for you:

  1. Production Build: It automatically re-renders your site using your production URL (defined in .env), ensuring no localhost links leak into the wild.
  2. Smart Sync: It checks what's changed. It uploads new files and—crucially—deletes old ones that are no longer part of your site.
  3. Safety: It tracks its own files using a manifest, so it won't accidentally delete other files on your server (like your server logs or other applications).

Configuration

Before you deploy, tell StaticForge where to go. Open your .env file and set up your credentials.

Pro Tip: We highly recommend using SSH Keys for authentication. It's more secure and means you don't have to put passwords in text files.

# Where is this site going to live?
UPLOAD_URL="https://www.mysite.com"

# Server Details
SFTP_HOST="example.com"
SFTP_USERNAME="your-username"
SFTP_REMOTE_PATH="/var/www/html"

# Authentication (Choose one)
SFTP_PRIVATE_KEY_PATH="/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa"
# OR
# SFTP_PASSWORD="your-password"

Host Key Verification

site:upload verifies the server's SSH host key on every connection using trust-on-first-use: the first time you connect to SFTP_HOST, it accepts and records the key the server presents (next to your private key if SFTP_PRIVATE_KEY_PATH is set, otherwise in ~/.ssh/known_hosts). Every connection after that compares against the recorded key and refuses to connect if it ever changes — this catches a server impersonating your host after the fact, though a first-connect man-in-the-middle is still possible if SFTP_HOST itself is wrong, the same trade-off as ssh's own StrictHostKeyChecking=accept-new.

If you already know the server's host key (or want to skip trust-on-first-use entirely), pin it explicitly:

SFTP_HOST_KEY="ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAA..."

Deploying

Once configured, going live is a single command.

php vendor/bin/staticforge.php site:upload

If you need to deploy to a staging server first, you can override the URL on the fly:

php vendor/bin/staticforge.php site:upload --url="https://staging.mysite.com"

Note: The first time you run this, it will upload everything. Subsequent runs will only upload changes, making updates lightning fast.

Troubleshooting