Commands

On this page

Working on a site
Building and publishing
Starting and themes

Run the commands in the site's folder, through your package manager (npx kilim build, pnpm kilim build) or a package.json script. kilim --help lists them all.

Working on a site

Command	What it does
`kilim dev`	Builds into `.kilim/dev`, serves it at port 1923 and rebuilds what changed on save.
`kilim new`	Creates a content file with a frontmatter skeleton from the collection schema.
`kilim types`	Writes the collections' TypeScript types to `.kilim/types.d.ts`.

kilim dev shows drafts and scheduled pages with a badge, an error overlay with the file and line when a build fails, the admin at /admin/ and a catalog of the theme's components and blocks at /__kilim/blocks. It only listens on localhost.

kilim new posts "Hello world" writes content/posts/hello-world.md with the collection's fields: the title, today's date when the schema has one, draft: true when it has a boolean draft, and the other optional fields as comments, except the ones marked .meta({ advanced: true }). --slug 2026/hello picks the file name.

Building and publishing

Command	What it does
`kilim build`	Builds the site into `dist/`. Nothing is written when a page fails.
`kilim check`	Runs the SEO and link rules over the last build; exits with 1 on errors.
`kilim preview`	Serves `dist/` at port 1453, with redirects and `404.html` like a static host.
`kilim deploy`	Builds, checks and uploads only what changed, with config `deploy`.
`kilim doctor`	Checks Node.js, the config, the theme, types, `url` and the deploy setup.

Useful options:

kilim check --format github writes GitHub Actions annotations on the content files; --format json (or --json) is for other tools.
--max-warnings <n> makes check, deploy and doctor fail on more than n warnings.
kilim preview --host opens the preview to your network, to try the site on a phone.
kilim deploy --dry-run lists what would change without uploading; see Deploy.

Starting and themes

Command	What it does
`kilim init [dir]`	Creates a site from a template (`--template` blog, landing or docs).
`kilim theme new <name>`	Writes a working theme skeleton to `themes/<name>/`.
`kilim theme add <source>`	Downloads a theme from GitHub, npm or a `.tgz` into `themes/`.

--port <port> changes the port of dev and preview.