Core concepts

The four-stage pipeline

Every build runs the same fixed pipeline: load app data → render pages → apply plugins → write output. Understanding these four stages explains almost everything about how Nera behaves.

app vs meta

Two data objects reach your templates:

• app — global values from config/app.yaml, available on every page.
• meta — per-page values: your frontmatter, plus derived keys like meta.href, meta.dirname, meta.filename and meta.createdAt.

Plugins add to both — for example, plugin-navigation sets app.nav, and plugin-tags sets meta.tagLinks.

Layouts

Layouts are Pug files under views/. A page's layout frontmatter picks one:

---
layout: pages/docs.pug
title: My page
---

Translations

config/app.yaml holds a translations map. In a layout, t('key') resolves app.translations[meta.lang || app.lang][key], falling back to the key itself — so missing translations are visible, not silent.