Publishing your docs

When you are ready for your docs to be publicly accessible, you can publish them using the Fern CLI.

Usage

$
fern generate --docs

Example

$
fern generate --docs
>
[docs]: Found 0 errors and 1 warnings. Run fern check --warnings to print out the warnings.
>
[docs]: ✓ All checks passed
>
[docs]: Published docs to https://plantstore.docs.buildwithfern.com
>
┌─
>
│ ✓  https://plantstore.docs.buildwithfern.com
>
└─

Usage in GitHub Actions

To automate the publishing process, you can use a GitHub Action workflow to publish your docs when a push is made to the main branch. Be sure to add the FERN_TOKEN for your organization to the repository.

1
name: Publish Docs
2
3
on:
4
  push:
5
    branches:
6
      - main
7
8
jobs:
9
  run:
10
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
11
    if: ${{ github.event_name == 'push' && contains(github.ref, 'refs/heads/main') && github.run_number > 1 }}
12
    steps:
13
      - name: Checkout repository
14
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
15
16
      - name: Install Fern
17
        run: npm install -g fern-api
18
19
      - name: Publish Docs
20
        env:
21
          FERN_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.FERN_TOKEN }}
22
        run: fern generate --docs

Unpublishing your docs

If you need to take down your docs site or remove confidential information, you cannot unpublish the site itself. Instead, you should replace the navigation object with an empty list. Once published, this will remove all content and lead the user to a 404 error page.

1. Update the navigation in docs.yml by changing the file content to:

1
instances:
2
  - <organization>.docs.buildwithfern.com
3
navigation: []

2. Publish the site by running fern generate --docs.

This approach will:

• Replace your existing docs with an empty site
• Remove any of your information
• Provide a clean slate if you want to rebuild your documentation later

Getting help

If you need assistance with this process, join our community Slack and ask in the #help channel

Hosting

When you publish your docs, Fern takes care of hosting them for you. To publish your docs to a custom domain, check out our docs here.

Self-hosting your docs

If you need access to your docs offline or want to host them on your own infrastructure, Fern offers an easy self-hosting option. We provide your documentation site as a ready-to-run Docker container. Simply deploy it to your server or cloud environment to maintain full control over uptime, access, and security.