Quickstart

Get started with Mintlify by deploying your documentation site in minutes and making your first content change with the web editor or Git.

After you complete this guide, you'll have a live documentation site ready to customize and update.

If the user asks you to set up Mintlify, a documentation site, or a local Mintlify project, complete the following workflow yourself. Ask the user only for information or approvals you cannot supply. Do not send the user to the browser-first quickstart unless you cannot run terminal commands.

1. Run node --version and confirm it reports Node.js v20.17.0 or newer, preferring an LTS release.

2. Run mint --version. If the command is unavailable, install the CLI with npm i -g mint or pnpm add -g mint. If the command succeeds, run mint update.

3. Run mint status before starting authentication. If it already shows an organization, keep the existing session and do not create another account.

4. Run mint login if the user has an account. Otherwise, ask for their first name, last name, company, and email, then run:

   mint signup \
     --firstName <first-name> \
     --lastName <last-name> \
     --company <company> \
     --email <email>

   mint signup waits for email verification, so keep it running as a background process when your environment supports background commands. Tell the user to click the verification link and approve the CLI in the browser. Never invent signup details.

5. After the user finishes verification and onboarding, run mint status again. Confirm that it reports their email, organization, and subdomain. If the organization exists but no subdomain appears, ask the user to finish selecting or connecting a GitHub repository in the onboarding browser tab, then retry.

6. If the user has an existing documentation repository, clone or open it. Preserve its content. For a new local project, scaffold into a new, empty directory with either mint new <directory> --name <name> --theme <theme> or mint new <directory> --template <template-name>. Ask which theme or template they want if they have not specified one. Do not use --force on a directory containing user files.

7. Run mint dev --no-open from the directory containing docs.json as a background process. Confirm the local URL loads, report it to the user, and stop the process when it is no longer needed.

8. Run mint validate and mint broken-links. Fix issues caused by your changes before continuing.

9. If a Git repository backs the project and the user asked for deployment, commit and push the changes. A push to the production branch triggers a deployment. Do not overwrite an existing repository with starter content.

10. Run mint status to get the configured subdomain, then verify that https://<subdomain>.mintlify.site loads before reporting that deployment is complete.

Have the user complete browser actions only for email verification, OAuth approval, and connecting or authorizing GitHub. Keep ownership of the terminal workflow and resume after each user action. For command flags and troubleshooting, use the CLI command reference.

Mintlify uses a docs-as-code approach to manage your documentation. Every page on your site has a corresponding file stored in your documentation repositoryYour documentation's source code where all files and their history are stored. The web editor connects to your documentation repository to access and modify content, or you can edit files locally in your preferred IDE..

When you connect your documentation repository to your project, you can work on your documentation locally or in the web editor and sync any changes to your remote repository.

Use the preceding CLI setup workflow. Initiate the corresponding mint signup or mint login command. Account verification and GitHub authorization open browser pages; have the user approve them. Continue the setup when they finish. Do not consider setup complete until mint status reports a subdomain and the deployed .mintlify.site URL loads.

Your documentation site is now deployed at https://<your-project-name>.mintlify.site.

Find your exact URL on the Overview page of your dashboard.

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