outDir logic is too confusing now

[ThePlenkov]

Describe the bug

I'm trying to build a site in a custom folder and noticed several issues.

My site is located in the folder sites/mysite.com.

When I run following command in the root of my project:

npx vitepress build  sites/mysite.com --outDir public

Instead of writing to ${workplaceFolder}/public it actually still resolves outDir relatively to sites/mySite.com so to make it working I need to use currently ../../public or $(pwd)/public which are both too confusing because from CLI call it looks like i write to something above.

My suggestion is that relative path needs to be resolved relatively to cwd, not a docs folder.

But even like that what I find even more strange - this setting only impacts assets, while actual html pages are still located in the .vitepress/dist folder. Do you know how to fix that too? THanks!

Reproduction

Just create a nested project like sites/test.site and try to build it to a public/test.site folder in your root.

Expected behavior

• command like vitepress build path/to/my/site --outDir public resolves to a public folder in your root - not in the package.
• html pages should be also built respectively to outDir parameter

System Info

System:
    OS: Linux 5.15 Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye) 11 (bullseye)
    CPU: (12) x64 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1265U
    Memory: 11.75 GB / 15.34 GB
    Container: Yes
    Shell: 5.1.4 - /bin/bash
  Binaries:
    Node: 20.3.1 - /usr/local/bin/node
    Yarn: 1.22.19 - /usr/local/bin/yarn
    npm: 9.6.7 - /usr/local/bin/npm
    pnpm: 8.6.6 - /usr/local/share/npm-global/bin/pnpm
  npmPackages:
    vitepress: ^1.0.0-beta.6 => 1.0.0-beta.6

Additional context

No response

Validations

• Check if you're on the latest VitePress version.
• Follow our Code of Conduct
• Read the docs.
• Check that there isn't already an issue that reports the same bug to avoid creating a duplicate.

[brc-dd]

Specifying outDir from command line is not supported. The way you're invoking, it passes that to vite instead of vitepress.

[ThePlenkov]

Well, in this case documentation may be confusing too, because I just follow: https://vitepress.dev/reference/cli#vitepress-build

So do you want to say that it must not be used at all? Thanks!

[brc-dd]

Ah, the support was added in 22047f3 . The second one is a bug then. Everything should be generated inside outDir. Regarding resolution from cwd vs project root, it's consistent across all the config: https://vitepress.dev/reference/site-config#outdir