Printing and deployment

The final chapter covers getting your book out into the world — as a printed/PDF document and as a deployed website.

Printing to PDF

Folio is print-ready out of the box. To export a chapter (or the whole book), just use your browser’s Print → Save as PDF. The result automatically:

• leaves out the navigation, buttons, footer, and theme toggle, so the PDF contains only your content;
• centers images and keeps them from overflowing the page;
• uses a comfortable, readable text size for print.

You can fine-tune the output with the utility classes from the writing chapter: .page-break forces a new page before an element, and .hidden-print hides anything you don’t want in the export.

Building the site

To produce the static site without running a server:

bundle exec jekyll build

The compiled HTML, CSS, and JS are written to _site/. That folder is fully self-contained and can be uploaded to any static host. (You normally don’t commit _site/ — let your host build it, or deploy the folder as an artifact.)

GitHub Pages

The simplest deployment path:

1. Push the repository to GitHub.
2. Open Settings → Pages.
3. Under Build and deployment, choose to build from a branch, then select the main branch and the / (root) folder.
4. GitHub runs Jekyll for you and publishes the result.

If you prefer to control the Jekyll version or add plugins, use a GitHub Actions workflow (the official actions/jekyll-build-pages action) instead of the built-in branch build. This guarantees the same Jekyll ~> 4.4 you use locally.

The baseurl and local development

A project site lives under a subpath (for example https://you.github.io/folio/), so the built site needs baseurl set to that subpath. But hard-coding baseurl: "/folio" in _config.yml forces you to browse http://localhost:4000/folio/ during development, which is easy to forget.

The cleaner approach is to leave baseurl empty in _config.yml (so local development works at the root) and let the deployment set it at build time. The actions/configure-pages step exposes the correct path, which the build picks up:

- name: Setup Pages
  id: pages
  uses: actions/configure-pages@v5

- name: Build with Jekyll
  run: bundle exec jekyll build --baseurl "$"

This way bundle exec jekyll serve works at http://localhost:4000 locally, while the deployed site still resolves all links under the project subpath. Because Folio’s templates build URLs with the relative_url filter, both environments work without any further changes.

Other static hosts

Because jekyll build emits a plain _site/ folder, Folio works on any static host — Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, GitLab Pages, S3, or your own server. Set the build command to bundle exec jekyll build and the publish directory to _site.

Custom domains

When serving from a custom domain:

1. Configure the domain with your host (for GitHub Pages, Settings → Pages → Custom domain, which writes a CNAME file).

2. Update url in _config.yml to the canonical address:

   url: "https://books.example.com"
   

Keeping url accurate ensures absolute links and the share feature point at the right place.