Preview Server

Introduction

After generating your site with bun ssg, the preview server serves the static output from dist/ so you can verify everything looks correct before deploying. It handles directory-style URLs (/about/ → about/index.html), detects language subdirectories, and serves assets with proper MIME types.

bun preview

This serves ./dist on the port from PORT in .env (the example .env ships PORT=3000); pass --port to override it.

CLI Options

bun scripts/preview.ts [--port 3000] [--dist ./dist]

How It Works

The preview server (scripts/preview.ts) is a minimal Bun HTTP server that:

1. Serves dist/index.html at the root (/) - the default language homepage
2. Resolves directory paths - /about/ looks for dist/about/index.html
3. Falls back to .html extensions - /en/about tries dist/en/about.html
4. Serves any other file directly - CSS, JS, images, fonts with correct MIME types
5. Returns 404 for anything that doesn't exist

Language Detection

At startup, the preview server scans the dist/ directory for subdirectories whose names match a configured language code in config/supported_languages.ts (e.g., en/, sl/, de/). Matching against the configured list - rather than any two-character directory - means content directories that happen to be two characters long (such as js/) are never mistaken for a language. It lists the detected languages in the startup log:

🖥️  Preview server ready at http://localhost:3000/
📂 Serving: ./dist
🌐 Languages: sl (default), en

The server doesn't apply language-specific logic - it simply serves files from the path the browser requests. If you navigate to /en/about/, it serves dist/en/about/index.html directly.

Production vs Development

The preview server is meant for verifying the built output - it's not a development server. The key differences:

MIME Types

The preview server maps file extensions to MIME types for correct Content-Type headers: