The sample application uses the published engine packages and a local copy or link of the theme sources. Run these commands from the sample application directory.

Preview while editing

dotnet run -- --preview

Preview mode serves the generated site locally, including drafts and future-scheduled posts with visible status badges. Never deploy preview/. After changing Razor or C# sources, stop the preview and restart with a build so the running application uses the new components.

Generate static output

dotnet run -- --build

The build command writes the static site to dist. Review that output before deploying it to a static host.

Mode	Output	Use it for
Preview	preview/	Local review only; includes unpublished content
Build	dist/	Eligible published content only; no status badges

Check the deployment base

For a site hosted at https://example.com/project/, configure Site.BaseUrl as /project/. The preview server mounts output at that prefix and redirects / to /project/. Configure the production host to mount generated files at the same path.

For a local subpath preview, follow the commands in the sample README. Site.TimeZone controls the publication instant for dates without offsets; the sample uses UTC. Generation captures one time snapshot. Rebuild at or after the publication time to publish scheduled content; there is no automatic publishing timer.

Before publishing, inspect a post, a page, the tag index, and the not-found output. Follow an image URL and a previous/next link as well as the header navigation.

Keep experimenting

This is the last opted-in page in both preview and production, so it has no Next link. Return through Previous, open the guide index, or browse the reference notes.