Drafts

A draft page can stay out of ordinary publication while it is unfinished:

# content/en/blog/new-article.page
draft = true
template = "post.tera"
title = "An unfinished article"

Run the development server with --drafts to see that page in its real site context:

cargo run -- serve --root /path/to/my-site --drafts

The preview includes draft pages in page links, collections, pagination, taxonomies, Series, feeds, sitemaps, and search indexes. page.draft is true for a draft and false for a published page, so a template can add a local preview treatment when it has a real reason to do so.

Publication boundary

An ordinary heine build, heine --quick, and heine serve exclude every page with draft = true before Heine resolves page relationships. A published page that links to a draft is therefore a checked error, rather than a link to an unpublished output file. The diagnostic names the target's source path and its draft = true state. It also explains that a local heine serve --drafts preview can include the target when the draft has an effective template.

Removing a final active member also removes its derived taxonomy term or Series listing. Configured empty outputs keep their usual behavior.

A future published value records chronology, not a release schedule. It does not withhold a page from a build; use draft = true until the page should participate in publication.

heine serve --drafts writes the configured output directory, not a separate preview tree. Before deployment, run a normal complete heine build. Its atomic publication replaces preview output and removes draft files.

heine --quick remains an incomplete local update. After changing draft, run a full build: a quick build can retain old page files and relationships from before that publication change.

While writing

Drafts may deliberately be incomplete. In an ordinary build, Heine still checks source-root safety, TOML syntax, the draft declaration, directory policy, copied assets, deployment files, and licensing. It also reserves paths named by a draft's [content] table, so an unfinished source file is not mistakenly copied as a public asset.

The page's template, declared content files, Markdown, metadata requirements, and relationships are checked when the draft is included in a --drafts preview. This lets normal publication remain coherent without treating an unfinished article as a completed page.

draft has only one useful authored value: true. Omit it to publish the page. draft = false and a draft key in _directory.toml are checked errors because draft state is page-local, not inherited.

The starter site includes an unpublished English blog post dated 17 August 2026. It is absent from the ordinary generated site and is available when you run its server with --drafts.

See the reference for the exact field contract and the development-server guide for local-server behavior.