Deployment

Deployment & Launch

Margo builds a static site into dist/, so it runs on any static host. It ships ready-made settings for Netlify (netlify.toml), Vercel (vercel.json, vercel.sh), and Cloudflare Pages (wrangler.toml). The site needs no account or environment variables.

Setting	Value
Build command	`npm run build`
Output directory	`dist`
Node.js version	22.23.4 or later
Package manager	npm (`package-lock.json`)

Before You Launch

Go through this list once. Each item links to the page that explains it.

Address and identity

[site] baseUrl is your real address, not the shipped https://example.com placeholder, and npm run build shows no [site] warning (SEO & AI Visibility)
title, tagline, description, and logoText in [site], and author and keywords in [seo], describe you or your studio. The tagline is added to every page title. French and Arabic have their own site.tagline and site.description in src/i18n/fr.json and src/i18n/ar.json (Config Reference)
[seo.identity] says whether the site belongs to a Person or an Organization, with your name and, for a person, your job title
The logo, favicons (npm run generate-favicons), social image (npm run generate-og-image, after the two items above), colors in theme.css, and fonts in fonts.json are yours (Site Identity & Logo, Colors & Fonts)

Contact and forms

contactFormAction and contactFormProvider post to your own account (Formsubmit, Formspree, or Netlify Forms), and the build prints no [forms] warning (Forms)
The Mailchimp formAction under [settings.subscription] is your list, or enable = false there if you don’t send a newsletter
email and booking under [settings.contactInfo] are yours. booking is where every Book a call button goes (Contact & Booking)
The contact rows in src/content/sections/<language>/contact-section.md, and the email and phone in footer.md and call-to-action.md, are yours (Footer)
A project-wide search for example.com and 555 finds nothing you still need to change

Sample content

The sample projects and photo series in src/content/projects/ are replaced with your own work, and the hero cards on the homepage point to them (Projects)
The services, journal posts and authors, team members, testimonials, and client logos are yours or removed (Collections)
Every price and question on the pricing and FAQ pages is yours (Pricing & FAQ)
Every sample photo is replaced (Icons & Images)

Pages and menus

The privacy policy, terms, and cookie policy in every language folder of src/content/pages/ (privacy-policy.mdx, terms-conditions.mdx, cookie-policy.mdx) are rewritten for your practice and reviewed. They ship as sample text with a notice at the top
The Pages demo menu is hidden ("enable": false in every menu file), and the menus point at your pages (Menus)
The demo homepages you don’t use are deleted (Homepages), and /elements/ and /components/ are removed if you don’t want the layout and shortcode galleries online (Pages)
[settings.layoutSwitcher] enable = false, and the PUBLIC_DEMO_MODE environment variable is not set on your host
footer.copyright in src/i18n/<language>.json reads the way you want, and the links in src/config/social.json are yours

Analytics and checks

Analytics tags are in [head], marked with data-consent while the cookie banner is on (Cookies & Analytics)
npm run astro-check and npm run build finish without errors, and you have looked at every page whose section files you changed (astro-check doesn’t check section files or the contact, FAQ, and pricing page files)
The Arabic text has been reviewed by a native speaker, if you keep Arabic
You checked the site at phone width, in dark mode, and in every language you keep

Deploy

Push your project to GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket.
In Netlify, choose Add new site → Import an existing project and pick the repository.
Netlify reads netlify.toml: build command npm run build, publish folder dist, Node.js 22. Click Deploy.

The build uses baseUrl from config.toml unless you add a SITE_URL environment variable in the Netlify site settings.

netlify.toml also sets long-term caching for /_astro/* and /images/*, and sends missing /fr/... and /ar/... URLs to that language’s 404 page. When you add a language, add its own block, as the comment in the file says.

Using Netlify Forms? Set contactFormProvider = "netlify" and contactFormAction = "/", enable form detection under Forms in the Netlify dashboard, and redeploy.

Push your project to GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket.
In Vercel, choose Add New → Project and import the repository. Framework preset: Astro.
Vercel reads vercel.json, which builds with sh vercel.sh. Click Deploy.

vercel.sh sets the site address (SITE_URL) for each build, and on Vercel it replaces baseUrl:

Production builds use the SITE_URL environment variable if you set one in the Vercel project settings. Otherwise they use your Vercel production domain. Set SITE_URL (for example https://www.your-domain.com) when you want one exact address, such as the www or the bare domain.
Preview builds use https://staging.<your production domain>.

Edit vercel.sh if you want something else.

vercel.json also turns on trailing slashes, redirects /sitemap.xml to /sitemap-index.xml, and serves the .md copies (marked noindex) and the llms files as text.

From git: in the Cloudflare dashboard, open Workers & Pages → Create → Pages → Connect to Git, pick the repository, and set the build command to npm run build and the output directory to dist (the same folder as pages_build_output_dir in wrangler.toml).

The included wrangler.toml sets NODE_VERSION = "22.13.1" under [vars], which is older than the 22.23.4 that Margo needs. Change it to "22.23.4" or a later version of Node 22 before your first deploy. Cloudflare treats this file as the source of truth for the settings in it and shows them read-only in the dashboard, so change them in the file. Set your address with baseUrl in config.toml.

From your computer: Margo doesn’t install Wrangler (Cloudflare’s command-line tool) for you. Add it once, change name in wrangler.toml (shipped as margo-astro) to your project name, then log in, build, and deploy:

npm install -D wrangler
npx wrangler login
npm run build
npm run deploy:cf

Run npm run build and upload the contents of dist/ to your web server or static host (GitHub Pages, S3, a shared host, and so on). The included public/.htaccess covers Apache.

Ask your host how to serve .md files as text/markdown and llms.txt as text/plain, if you keep [seo.ai] markdownPages and llmsTxt on. Without that, some browsers download those files instead of showing them.

After You Launch

Open the live site and click through the main pages, on a computer and on a phone, including the mobile menu, a project page, and dark mode.
Send a test message through the contact form, and sign up to the newsletter if you use it, and check that both arrive.
Open the search with ⌘ + K (Ctrl + K on Windows) and search for one of your projects.
Click a Book a call button and check that it opens your scheduling page.
Submit https://your-domain/sitemap-index.xml in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Check the homepage and a project page with Google’s Rich Results Test.
Share a link in a chat app to check the preview image.

Tell Search Engines About Changes With IndexNow

IndexNow tells Bing, Yandex, Seznam, and Naver which pages changed, so they visit them sooner. Bing also feeds ChatGPT search and Copilot. It is off until you set a key:

In config.toml, set indexNowKey under [seo.ai] to a key of 8 to 128 letters, numbers, or dashes that you make up:
```
[seo.ai]
  indexNowKey = "a1b2c3d4-your-own-key"
```
Build and deploy. The build publishes the key file at https://your-domain/<key>.txt, which the search engines check.

After each deploy is live, run from your computer:

npm run build                # indexnow reads the sitemap in dist/
npm run indexnow             # pages changed in the last 7 days
npm run indexnow -- --all    # every page: use it after your first launch

npm run indexnow -- --days=30 sends the pages changed in the last 30 days, and npm run indexnow -- --dry-run lists the pages without sending them.

Updating The Live Site

With a git-connected host, every push to your main branch deploys automatically. Build locally first (npm run build) to catch errors before they reach your visitors.