Publish

The decision to include content in the published site, controlled by the publish strategy and frontmatter such as published and visibility. Published content enters the publication boundary views.

Inputs to the decision

• The configured publish strategy.
• The published frontmatter field.
• The visibility frontmatter field.

Result

Content that passes enters the routable and discoverable views. Content that fails is a draft and is excluded from the published set.

Publish resolution flow

The publish decision is made by resolvePublishingState (packages/core/src/content/publishing.ts), which considers both the publish strategy and frontmatter fields. The function returns a ResolvedPublishingState with visibility, routable, and discoverable fields:

• If explicit visibility is "draft" → draft state, not routable or discoverable
• If publishAt is set and in the future → scheduled state, not routable or discoverable
• If explicit visibility is "unlisted" → unlisted state, routable but not discoverable
• If explicit visibility is "public" or publishAt is set → public state, routable and discoverable
• Otherwise → isPublishable is called with the strategy; if true → public, if false → draft

// From packages/core/src/content/publishing.ts
export function resolvePublishingState(
  frontmatter: PostFrontmatter | undefined,
  options: PublishingResolutionOptions,
): ResolvedPublishingState {
  // ... logic as above
}

Publish strategy configuration

The publish strategy is configured per-site and defaults to "selective". In explicit strategy mode, only notes with publish: true in frontmatter are public. In selective mode (the default), notes are public unless private: true or draft: true is set.

// From packages/core/src/types/publish_strategy.ts
export type PublishStrategy = "explicit" | "selective";

Publish Frontmatter

The decision is grounded in the PublishFrontmatter type from packages/core/src/types/publish_strategy.ts:

export type PublishFrontmatter = {
  readonly publish?: unknown;
  readonly private?: unknown;
  readonly draft?: unknown;
};

Three fields control the publish decision: publish (opt-in), private (opt-out), and draft (unpublished). The presence and values of these fields are interpreted differently depending on the active strategy.

isPublishable Logic

The isPublishable function (packages/core/src/types/publish_strategy.ts) implements two strategies:

• explicit: frontmatter.publish === true — only notes explicitly opted in are public.
• selective: not (private === true or draft === true) — notes are public unless explicitly hidden.

export function isPublishable(
  strategy: PublishStrategy,
  frontmatter: PublishFrontmatter | undefined,
): boolean {
  if (strategy === "explicit") {
    return frontmatter?.publish === true;
  }
  return !(frontmatter?.private === true || frontmatter?.draft === true);
}