Docs/Export/Publishing

Publishing

Turn your notes into a website other people can browse — and, when you're ready, put that website online.

Make a website

Minerva can turn your whole collection of notes into a self-contained website, complete with a sidebar, a search box, and a page for each note. Anyone you share it with can read and search it in a browser.

If you want a particular note to look a certain way when it's shared, you can set a few extra properties at the top of that note:

Preview image
The thumbnail that appears when the note's link is shared on social media or in a chat.
Background
A custom background color for the note's page.
Custom styling
Your own styling to give the page a distinct look.

Put it online

Making a website leaves the files on your computer. When you want it live for others to visit, Publish to Web sends it to a destination you set up once. After that, republishing is a single action whenever you've made changes and want the live version to catch up.

There are two kinds of destination. Pick whichever you already have, or whichever sounds less like work:

A GitHub repository
Free hosting through GitHub Pages, with a real web address. Minerva can set the whole thing up for you, including creating the repository. Best if you don't already have somewhere to host a site.
An S3 bucket
Amazon S3, or anything that speaks the same language — Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, DigitalOcean Spaces, MinIO on your own server. Best if you already have storage, or want the site behind your own domain and CDN.

Add one from the Publish window: give it a name, choose which kind, and fill in the handful of details below. You can keep several destinations — a public site and a private draft copy, say — and publish to whichever you mean today.

The Publish to Web window listing two saved destinations — a GitHub repository publishing to the gh-pages branch, and an S3 bucket — each with Preview and Publish buttons.
Screenshot — Publish to Web, with a destination of each kind

Publishing to GitHub Pages

Give Minerva the repository's address and the branch to publish to (gh-pages is the usual choice, and the default). Then either sign in with the GitHub command-line tool, or paste a personal access token into the destination — the token is stored encrypted on your machine and never leaves it except to talk to GitHub. Test connection checks it before you rely on it.

Two things Minerva handles so you don't have to visit GitHub's settings:

Creating the repository
If the repository doesn't exist yet, publishing stops and offers to create it — public or private, your choice. Nothing is created until you pick one, and nothing is published in the meantime.
Turning Pages on
After the first successful publish, Minerva points GitHub Pages at your branch and shows you the address of the finished site. GitHub takes a minute or so to build it the first time.

A few things GitHub decides, not Minerva:

Where the site can live
Pages serves from the top of the repository or from a docs folder — nowhere else. If you've set your destination to publish into some other subdirectory, the files still get pushed; you'd just point Pages at them yourself.
Private repositories
GitHub only serves Pages from a private repository on a paid plan. On a free account, choose public.
What your token may do
Publishing needs permission to push. Creating the repository for you needs a little more than that, and switching Pages on more again. If a token can push but not create, Minerva says exactly which permission is missing rather than leaving you with a number.

Publishing to S3 or compatible storage

Give Minerva the bucket name and the credentials to write to it. The secret key is stored encrypted, the same as the GitHub token, and Test connection confirms the bucket is reachable before you publish into it.

Endpoint
Leave blank for Amazon S3. For R2, B2, Spaces, or a MinIO server, paste that provider's endpoint address — that one field is what makes the others work.
Region
Your bucket's region, where the provider uses one.
Key prefix
A folder inside the bucket to publish into, if you don't want the site at the very top.

Minerva uploads the site; serving it is the bucket's job. Whichever provider you're using, its own docs will tell you how to switch on website hosting — or you can put a CDN in front of it and use your own domain.

Try it before it's live

Every destination offers Preview: Minerva does everything except the last step — the push, or the upload — and shows you exactly which pages would be added, changed, or removed. It's the quickest way to confirm you're publishing what you think you are, particularly the first time or after a big reorganization.

This one goes public

Everything else in this section stays on your own machine until you decide otherwise. Publishing to the web is the exception — when you run it for real, your site goes live. It's worth a quick glance to confirm you've picked the right destination before you do.