Run Antora to Generate Your Site

Assumptions:

On this page, you’ll learn:

  • How to run Antora and generate a site.

Antora demo playbook and content repositories

You don’t need to set up a playbook file, component version, or UI to evaluate Antora. Instead, you can use the Antora demo playbook and content repositories.

The demo consists of a playbook repository containing a playbook file and content repositories (component-a and component-b) to which that playbook refers. It also uses the UI bundle produced by the default UI project.

Once you’ve installed Antora, you can run Antora using the demo materials to explore its capabilities. The instructions and examples on this page will guide you through the process.

Choose a playbook

To produce a documentation site, Antora needs a playbook. But first, you’ll need to create or choose a directory where you’ll store the playbook and where the generated site files will be saved (assuming you use the default output configuration).

For the examples on this page, we’ll use the demo playbook and content repositories.

  1. Open a terminal and make a new directory named demo-site.

    ~ $ mkdir demo-site

  2. Switch (cd) into the directory you just made.

    ~ $ cd demo-site

  3. Using your preferred text editor or IDE, create a new playbook file named antora-playbook.yml and populate it with the contents of the following example. Or, you can download the playbook file from the demo project repository.

    antora-playbook.yml
    site:
  title: Antora Demo Site
  url: https://my-antora-demo-site.org (1)
  start_page: component-b::index.adoc (2)
content:
  sources:
  - url: https://gitlab.com/antora/demo/demo-component-a.git
    branches: HEAD
  - url: https://gitlab.com/antora/demo/demo-component-b.git
    branches: [v2.0, v1.0]
    start_path: docs
ui:
  bundle:
    url: https://gitlab.com/antora/antora-ui-default/-/jobs/artifacts/HEAD/raw/build/ui-bundle.zip?job=bundle-stable
    snapshot: true
    1 The 404 page and sitemap files are only generated if the site url key is set. The sitemap files are only generated if the value of the site url key is an absolute URL.
    2 The site start_page key accepts the same resource ID syntax that’s used in xrefs.

  4. Save the playbook as antora-playbook.yml in the demo-site directory you made in Step 1.

Run Antora

  1. To generate the site with the default Antora site generator, point the antora command at your playbook file. In the terminal, type:

    demo-site $ antora antora-playbook.yml

    If Antora is installed locally, you’ll need to prefix the Antora command with npx:

    demo-site $ npx antora antora-playbook.yml

    Antora will clone the content repositories. The cloning progress of each repository is displayed in the terminal.

    Repository cloning progress
    [clone] https://gitlab.com/antora/demo/demo-component-a.git [################]
[clone] https://gitlab.com/antora/demo/demo-component-b.git [################]

    Once cloning is complete, Antora converts the AsciiDoc pages to embeddable HTML, wraps the HTML in the UI page templates, then assembles the pages into a site under the destination folder, which defaults to build/site.

  2. Antora has completed generation when the command prompt ($) reappears in the terminal.

    If something goes wrong during generation, you’ll see an error message in the terminal.

    error: a message that summarizes what went wrong

    If this message does not provide enough information to fix the problem, you can ask Antora for more context. To tell Antora to reveal the calls leading up to the error (i.e., the stacktrace), run the antora command again, this time with the --stacktrace option:

    demo-site $ antora --stacktrace antora-playbook.yml

    Share this stacktrace when asking for help.

  3. Switch into the site folder (cd) and list (ls) its contents.

    demo-site $ cd build/site/

    Inside the build/site folder, run:

    site $ ls -1

    You should see the following list of files and directories:

    _
404.html
component-a
component-b
index.html
sitemap-component-a.xml
sitemap-component-b.xml
sitemap.xml
    The 404 page and sitemap files will be missing if the site.url property is not defined in your playbook. The main sitemap file is actually a sitemap index. That file links to the sitemap for each component, which is where the URL for the individual pages can be found.

    This list includes the entry point of your documentation site, index.html.

  4. On some operating systems, you can open the site directly from the command line by typing open, followed by the name of the HTML file.

    site $ open index.html

    Or, you can navigate to an HTML page inside the destination folder in your browser. If you’ve been following along with the Demo materials, once you find the demo-site directory, navigate to the file build/site/index.html.

Private git repositories

Antora can authenticate with private repositories using HTTP Basic authentication over HTTPS. See Private repository authentication to learn more.