#Publishing Stories & Books

StoryLark supports standalone stories, multi-chapter books, and a library that contains both. The supported setup starts with one of three content entry points: Portal, Repository, or CMS / API. The CLI and generated GitHub workflows remain useful publishing tools, but they are not extra connection types.

#Format first

The common source format is plain Markdown. A single .md file is a standalone story; a folder with book metadata and ordered chapter files is a book. See authoring-stories.md and the normative content-format.md.

#Choose who owns the source

Pick one owner for each book or story:

The last column is important. Repository mode is saved by StoryLark's setup wizard or Connect a repo flow. If Repository was selected during setup and Connections is blank, installation did not finish correctly. A deliberately configured advanced workflow can still clone a repository and publish through /api/content/v1, but that is a publishing tool rather than a saved connection.

#Admin: Upload Markdown

Open /admin, choose Stories & Books, then Upload markdown. You can create a standalone story or add content to a book without a local checkout. Text publishes immediately. If narration is configured, the changed chapter is added to the Narration queue; until it completes, existing audio can be marked out of date and text-only content uses the device speech fallback.

Once published, deployment-owned content can be edited with live preview, downloaded as Markdown, reordered, reverted through five-version history, and deleted with typed confirmation. Content marked managed externally is read-only: change or remove it in its source system, then publish or sync again.

#Admin: Connect a repo

Choose Repository in the setup wizard, or Connect a repo later, when you want StoryLark itself to store and operate a read-only repository connection. The flow validates the repository before it writes anything and, once saved, Connections shows the URL, branch, path, credential presence, last/next sync, Sync now, webhook state, and per-file results.

Public repositories need no credential. Private repositories need a durable, read-only token scoped to that repository. Never commit it. A GitHub App installation token that expires in about an hour is useful for an automation run, but it is not a durable credential for scheduled sync.

For an existing live library, use Adopt matching live books only after a backup. Adoption is atomic and matching-only: chapter set, rendered content, order, visible metadata, and cover identity must all match. StoryLark changes ownership metadata without replacing content objects, narration, timings, or voice variants. Run Sync now twice and require the second run to report zero writes before considering the change complete. See deployment-safety.md.

#Publish with narration through GitHub

The GitHub-backed publisher is a different door. It commits source Markdown to the publisher site's repository and dispatches publish.yml, which runs the same pipeline used by the CLI. It is useful when you want a browser front door to a repository-owned narration workflow.

It requires GITHUB_REPO plus a durable repository-scoped GITHUB_DEPLOY_TOKEN with the exact permissions documented in admin-guide.md. Those settings enable this publishing workflow; they do not create an Admin repo connection.

The generated publish.yml is deliberately text-only unless AZURE_SPEECH_KEY and AZURE_SPEECH_REGION are present; with those secrets it publishes Azure narration. To use the free bundled narrator, publish from a machine or runner that has the local model dependencies and ffmpeg, and do not pass --no-audio. The portal must report honestly when a publish is text-only.

#CLI publish

For full local control, including narration and word timings:

In a site created with npm create storylark, the brand and default content/ source are already in the package script:

npm run publish

For a different source directory, or in custom automation, invoke the installed binary explicitly:

npx storylark-publish --brand <id> --source <path-to-content>

Engine contributors running the monorepo can use node packages/pipeline/publish.mjs instead.

The bundled local narrator is the free default. Add --no-audio for a text-only publish, or select the Azure storage/provider options documented in content-pipeline.md.

Re-publishing is incremental: unchanged chapters are not rewritten, and a text edit re-narrates only changed blocks. Before publishing from a working tree that may have diverged from Admin, use --pull. A true conflict is refused instead of silently overwriting live text; --force is the explicit override.

#Publish from your own system

If you already have a CMS, release job, or GitHub Actions workflow, call /api/content/v1 directly. The versioned contract supports a chapter, a whole book, and zip/batch catalogue imports. Content appears as externally managed so Admin cannot accidentally edit a copy your source system will overwrite later. See the engine content API reference.

This is how an external repository workflow can publish without appearing in Connections: the workflow owns the repository access; StoryLark receives the result through the API.

#Removing or changing content

• For deployment-owned content, edit or delete it in Stories & Books.
• For a saved Admin repo connection, edit the repository and sync. Missing files are reported but never auto-deleted; an operator confirms removal.
• For API/Actions-managed content, change or delete it at the source and use the API's delete operation when removal is intended.
• For CLI-owned content, change the Markdown and publish again.

These rules protect against data loss: an absent file, partial archive, failed fetch, renamed directory, or wrong branch is never treated as permission to erase a live story.

Found a gap? StoryLark is open source — improve these docs on GitHub.