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CLI Reference

The guss binary provides five commands.

guss init

guss init [dir]

Scaffold a new Guss project. Creates guss.yaml, templates/, and content/ with the default Pinguin theme.

If dir is omitted, scaffolds in the current directory. If the directory does not exist, it is created.

guss build

guss build [-c config] [-v] [--clean]

Run the full 4-phase pipeline (Fetch → Prepare → Render → Write) with a progress bar.

Flag Description
-c config Path to the configuration file (default: guss.yaml)
-v Verbose output — sets log level to debug
--clean Remove the output directory before building

On completion, reports item count, archive count, extras generated (sitemap, RSS), and total duration.

guss ping

guss ping [-c config]

Test the connection to the configured content source. For REST API adapters, makes a test request to each endpoint and reports the HTTP status. For Markdown adapters, verifies the configured paths exist and are readable.

Useful for validating credentials and connectivity before a full build.

guss clean

guss clean [-c config]

Remove the output directory (output.output_dir from config, default dist). Equivalent to rm -rf dist/.

guss serve

guss serve [-d dir]

Start a local HTTP server serving the output directory. Wraps python3 -m http.server on port 8080.

Flag Description
-d dir Directory to serve (default: dist)

This is a convenience command for local preview. For production, use a real web server or CDN.