Other Hosts

A Clay build is a folder of static files, publish/public. Any service or server that serves static files can host it. Three things matter everywhere:

1. Build command: npx clay build --strict
2. Output folder: publish/public
3. Base URL: if the site does not live at the root of its domain, set baseURL in clay.yaml or CLAY_BASE_URL in the build settings.

#Netlify

In Site configuration → Build & deploy, or in a netlify.toml:

[build]
  command = "npx clay build --strict"
  publish = "publish/public"

[build.environment]
  NODE_VERSION = "22"

Netlify serves 404.html for unknown addresses on its own.

#Cloudflare Pages

Create a project from your repository and set:

#GitLab Pages

GitLab publishes the folder public of a job named pages. Move the build there in .gitlab-ci.yml:

pages:
  image: node:22
  variables:
    GIT_DEPTH: 0   # full history for last-updated dates
  script:
    - npm ci
    - npx clay build --strict
    - mv publish/public public
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public
  rules:
    - if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == $CI_DEFAULT_BRANCH

Project sites on GitLab live under the project’s name, like on GitHub: set baseURL: "/my-project/".

#Your own web server

Copy publish/public to the server and serve it as static files. Each page is a folder with an index.html, so the server should:

• serve index.html for folder addresses (/guides/setup/ → /guides/setup/index.html),
• answer unknown addresses with 404.html and status 404.

For nginx, with the site at the root of the domain:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name docs.example.com;
    root /var/www/docs;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

    error_page 404 /404.html;
}

With Docker:

FROM nginx:alpine
COPY publish/public /usr/share/nginx/html