CLI

Methanol ships a small CLI wrapper with dev, build, and preview commands.

Commands

Quick start with npx:

npx methanol dev      # start dev server
npx methanol build    # build to dist/
npx methanol serve    # serve the production build

For a faster CLI startup, install globally:

npm install methanol -g
methanol dev

You can pass input and output as positional args (order matters):

npx methanol build ./pages ./dist

For dev, only input is used:

npx methanol dev ./pages

--input, -i: override pages/
--components: override components/
--assets: override public/
--output, -o: override dist/
--config, -c: set a config file path
--site-name: override the site name
--base: override site.base for this run (ignored in dev)
--port: set the dev/preview port (default: 5173)
--host: bind the dev/preview server to a host (--host alone binds to all interfaces)
--intermediate-dir: write intermediate HTML output to a directory (build only)
--emit-intermediate: write intermediate HTML output to build/ (build only)
--code-highlighting: enable/disable code highlighting (--code-highlighting enables; --code-highlighting false disables)
-v, --verbose: enable verbose output (shows Vite + Pagefind logs during build)

Highlighting is off by default. Use the flag to enable it for a run.

node node_modules/methanol/bin/methanol.js dev