render

pterodocs render

Renders every page and writes the result to the output directory. It contacts nothing and needs no credentials, which makes it the safe thing to run first, and safe in CI.

What it writes

.pterodocs/
  pages/<locale>/<version>/<path>.html   the composed block markup, one file per page
  manifest.json                          every page, with its parent, slug, order and URL
  media.json                             every image, its hash and whether it uploaded
  plan.json                              what a sync would do, and every issue raised
  docs.css                               the stylesheet the pages were rendered against
  llms.txt, llms-full.txt                the LLM index and full text

Open a file under pages/ to see exactly what would be stored as a page’s content.

Reviewing a change

render is how you review a rendering change before it reaches a site. Render, keep the output, make the change, render again, and diff the two trees:

npx pterodocs render --out /tmp/before
# change something
npx pterodocs render --out /tmp/after
diff -r /tmp/before/pages /tmp/after/pages

An empty diff means the change is invisible to WordPress.

docs.css

Written whether or not the pages carry it, because storing one stylesheet on fifty pages is fifty copies. Paste it into Appearance → Customise → Additional CSS and set render.styles to 'none'.

Relation to sync

render is sync with the network switched off — the same code path, the same output. sync --offline is the same thing.