Choose your Nibleaf path

Nibleaf is a documentation platform for teams that want a browser editor without giving up portable Markdown. You write and review a draft, then publish an immutable snapshot that readers can search and navigate.

Choose Cloud or self-hosting

Nibleaf Cloud

Choose Nibleaf Cloud when you want to evaluate the product or start writing without infrastructure work.

• You operate: your content and team settings.
• Nibleaf operates: the application and supporting services.

Self-hosting

Choose self-hosting when you need the application and data on infrastructure you control.

• You operate: DNS, TLS, Postgres, Dragonfly, object storage, email, backups, monitoring, and upgrades.
• Nibleaf provides: the application source, container images, Compose templates, and installation tooling.

Cloud is a free beta. It does not currently carry an enterprise uptime or support commitment. Self-hosting gives you operational control, not fewer operational responsibilities. Review known limitations before choosing either path for a critical workload.

Understand drafts and published versions

Nibleaf stores the active page tree and Markdown drafts in Postgres. Selecting Publish creates a deployment job. The worker freezes the current content and configuration into a versioned snapshot and marks it ready only after the job succeeds. Readers keep receiving the previous ready version while a new version builds.

This boundary prevents a half-written draft from leaking into the public site. It does not replace backups, review, or source control: database state can still be lost, and a correctly built version can still contain incorrect content.

Define a first-success test

Before importing a large knowledge base, publish a two-page project:

1. Write an introduction that names the audience and the result they can reach.
2. Add a second page under a group and link to it from the introduction.
3. Preview both pages and wait for autosave to report Saved.
4. Publish once.
5. Open the public site while signed out, search for a phrase from the second page, and request a made-up URL to confirm a real 404.

You have a successful baseline when the public site, deep link, search result, and 404 response all behave as expected. Continue with the Cloud tutorial or the self-hosted tutorial.

Know where product truth lives

The public repository is authoritative for code, environment variables, Compose topology, and release tags. This documentation explains how to use those artifacts. When a command or setting differs from the checked-out release, follow the template shipped with that release and report the documentation gap.

Use the API specification served at /docs on the API service for exact server routes. Use .env.production.example for the complete production setting list.