#Publishing

#What gets published

The plugin writes the history to git-diff-data/ in the build output.

• pages/: the revisions of each page and the page version at each tag where the page existed
• tags.json: the names of the tags written
• log/: the recent commits of each version and language
• blobs/: the source of every page version that these refer to

These are static files that anyone can fetch, whether or not they open a diff. Text that was removed from the docs stays readable in the versions that contain it. If old versions must not be published, set since to a tag or commit; nothing older than that point is written.

Commit messages are processed before they are written, and only the subject line is used (see Commit messages). Email addresses of authors are never written.

#Build in CI

A shallow clone cuts the history short, and the plugin warns when it detects one. Fetch the full history and the tags before building.

- uses: actions/checkout@v4
  with:
    fetch-depth: 0
    fetch-tags: true

#Uncommitted changes

The plugin reads committed history only. Pages added or edited without a commit have no history until they are committed.

#Large sites

The output grows with the history. git-diff-data/ holds every version of every page in the history, and the index of each page records the version of the page at every tag. Two options narrow down what is written.

• tagPattern: only the tags readers should use in ?diff= are recorded. Without it, every tag in the repository is recorded for every page, including tags of packages in a monorepo. The build warns when it writes more than 20 tags without tagPattern.
• since: the history before a tag or commit, such as the last major release, is not written. This removes the old versions themselves, which make up most of the output.

With since, only tags that descend from since in the history are written. In a repository that tags its releases on release branches, a release tag as since leaves out the later release tags too, because they are on other branches. In that case, set since to the commit on the main branch where the release branch starts, such as the output of git merge-base v2.0.0 main.

As an example, these are the sizes for the documentation of Rspack (374 pages, 1,212 commits, release tags on release branches), measured in October 2026 with tagPattern: /^v\d/:

Without tagPattern, all 402 tags of the repository were recorded, and git-diff-data/ was 91.3 MiB. Pages that have not changed since since have no history; with v2.0.0, 18 of the 374 pages had none.

To see what reading the history costs, set RSPRESS_GIT_DIFF_STATS=1. The build then prints the time, the heap in use and the counts of each step: reading the log, reading the page contents, building the data and writing the files.

RSPRESS_GIT_DIFF_STATS=1 rspress build