Start from scratch

When you add a site, Papervine asks how you want to start. Start from scratch creates a site with no Git repository at all: Papervine hosts the content, you write it in Studio, and Publish puts it live.

This is the fastest way to a real docs site, and it needs no GitHub account. If you already keep docs in a repository, connect it instead — that path is unchanged.

Create the site

Writing and publishing

Everything happens in Studio. Edit a page, and your changes are saved as a draft that only you and your teammates can see. When you’re ready, hit Publish and the change is live on your site.

Publishing is one action. There are no branches to choose between and no pull request to merge, because there’s no repository underneath — Papervine writes your published content straight to your site.

What differs from a Git-backed site

Only the things that are about Git:

	Papervine-hosted	Git-backed
Source of truth	Your content in Papervine	Your repository
Editing	Studio	Studio, or your editor and a git push
Publishing	One Publish action, straight to live	A commit or a pull request
Branches	One	Any branch in your repo
Rebuild on push	—	Every push to the connected branch
Git settings	Connect to GitHub	Repository, branch, and docs folder

Everything else is identical, because it isn’t about where the content came from: your own domain, search, the AI assistant, reader access control, analytics, exports, and Autopilot all work the same way.

Which should you pick?

Start from scratch if you want to be writing in the next minute, if your team doesn’t work in Git, or if these docs don’t have a natural home in an existing repository.

Connect a repository if your docs already live in one, if you want changes to go through code review, or if you want your documentation to ship alongside the code it describes.

You aren’t locked in either way — see Moving to GitHub later.

Moving to GitHub later

A hosted site can be handed over to Git whenever you want, from Settings → Git settings → Connect to GitHub. Papervine commits everything the site currently publishes into a repository you own, then Git becomes the source of truth: pushes rebuild the site, and Studio publishes as a commit or a pull request.

There are two ways to do it:

• Let Papervine create the repository. Pick a name, authorize the GitHub app, and it creates the repository on your account and commits your content into it in one step. You’ll only see this option if your Papervine deployment is set up for it.
• Create the repository yourself. Make a new empty one on GitHub, install the GitHub App on it so Papervine can write to it, then enter owner/name.

Either way, Papervine needs write access to the repository, which is what installing the GitHub App grants.

If the repository already has docs in it

An empty repository is the simple case: your content becomes its first commit. If the repository already has documentation, Papervine asks which version should be live from now on, rather than guessing.

• Keep this site’s content — your pages are committed over the repository’s. What was there stays in the repository’s history, so it’s still recoverable; it just stops being what the site serves.
• Keep the repository’s content — the site adopts the repository and starts serving it. Your current pages are committed to a papervine/hosted-content branch first, because unlike the repository’s files they have no history to fall back on.

One limit: the repository can only take over if it contains a docs.json or mint.json. Without one there’d be no configuration for the site to render from, so that option isn’t offered.

Where to go next