The authoring loop

Writing on a Cherry site is four verbs. Here's the whole loop with real output.

Scaffold a draft

cherry gen.post "Growing season" --json

json

{
  "ok": true,
  "command": "gen.post",
  "data": {
    "date": "2026-08-10",
    "path": "content/posts/2026-08-10-growing-season.md",
    "slug": "growing-season"
  }
}

The file lands with valid frontmatter and draft: true:

markdown

---
title: Growing season
date: 2026-08-10
tags: []
draft: true
description:
---

Note

data.path is source-relative. Every later command that takes a path, publish included, wants it exactly in that form, so you can pipe one envelope straight into the next command untouched.

Write with the server running

cherry serve

Drafts are included in serve mode and every save reloads the browser. Real builds (cherry build) exclude drafts unless you pass --drafts; future-dated posts stay hidden unless you pass --future.

The server binds port 4000 by default; --port 0 picks any free port and reports it, which is the right choice for scripts and agents that cannot assume 4000 is available.

Publish

Publishing flips the draft flag off and re-dates the post to today. Name the draft by path, or just by the slug gen.post gave you. Filename, frontmatter, and URL all move together:

cherry publish growing-season --json

json

{
  "ok": true,
  "command": "publish",
  "data": {
    "date": "2026-08-14",
    "from": "content/posts/2026-08-10-growing-season.md",
    "to": "content/posts/2026-08-14-growing-season.md"
  }
}

Warning

The file moved: anything referencing from needs updating to to. If a script drives this step, capture both.

What a post becomes

One markdown file fans out into the built site as:

growing-season/index.html: the themed page
growing-season/index.md: a markdown mirror of the same content, curl-able with no theme wrapping
an entry in feed.xml, feed.json, sitemap.xml, and the blog index
a tag page per tag, with JSON-LD structured data in the post's head

Nothing on that list is opt-in. Check the verifier guide for keeping it all honest.