Quickstart

Sign up, then name your organization. The name you pick becomes a URL-safe slug, and that slug is part of your docs site’s address — you’ll see the preview update as you type.

An organization owns your sites, your teammates, and your plan. Most companies need exactly one.

Adding a site starts with a choice: Start from scratch, or Connect a GitHub repo. This page follows the repository path — for the other one, see Start from scratch.

Choose Connect a GitHub repo and authorize Papervine to read the repository you want to publish. Pick the repo, the branch to publish from (usually main), and the folder holding your docs if they aren’t at the root.

Papervine reads the repository — it never writes to it unless you explicitly use the browser editor and choose to publish.

Connecting kicks off a build immediately and returns you to the site’s Overview, where the Activity feed shows progress. The first sync reads every file, compiles your MDX, and builds the search index, so it takes longer than later ones — a large repository can take a minute or two.

You don’t need to wait on this screen. The status moves to Live on its own.

A Papervine-hosted site skips this step entirely — there’s no repository to read, so it’s live the moment you create it.

The Overview shows your site’s address. Open it and you have a complete docs site: navigation from your docs.json, full-text search on Cmd/Ctrl-K, dark mode, and — if enabled — the AI assistant.

Edit a page in your repository and push to the branch you connected. Papervine picks up the push and rebuilds automatically. See Publishing and syncing for what triggers a rebuild and how to force one.

Prefer not to touch Git? Studio edits the same content in the browser and publishes as a commit or a pull request.