Create a mesh

This section is the practical how-to: it takes you from nothing to a published page, using only the gtmesh CLI and two repo-local skills. If you are new to the vocabulary (registry, catalogue, seal), skim the glossary and mental models first — the words below all live there.

The pipeline in one line


discover → init --from-discovery → extract → plan → apply → promote → write → seal → publish

Each verb does one thing and commits its result. Nothing is hidden state: the committed registry (registry/pages.csv) is the source of truth for every page that could exist and what state each is in.

The two loops

The pipeline above is not really one straight line. It is two loops that share a registry, with one human gate between them.

The catalogue loop (cheap, automatic): extract → plan → apply. This keeps a map of everything that could exist in sync with your keyword data. It creates no pages and writes no prose, so it is safe to run on a schedule.
The production loop (deliberate, human-driven): promote → apply → write → seal → publish. This decides which catalogued pages you actually build, then builds, reviews, and ships them.

promote is the gate between the two. It sets a page’s status and builds nothing — so the expensive, human-facing step (writing) is always an explicit, reviewable choice, never a side effect of a data pull.

The diff is always registry-to-registry. plan compares what the registry should be (from your inputs) against the committed registry; apply makes reality match. plan is read-only; apply, seal, and the lifecycle commands (promote, publish, …) are the only things that write state.

Where to go next

Before you start — what to have ready before discovery: the business facts, demand access, and the one mindset shift (your internal labels are not search queries).
End-to-end walkthrough — the full happy path, step by step: what each command does, what it reads and writes, what gets committed, and where a human decides.
The discovery contract — every block of gtmesh-discovery.yaml, the file that lets init --from-discovery scaffold a project tailored to your business, with a worked example per site type.
After discovery — you have a repo, now what: how to read the plan, the patterns to look for, what to tune, and how to scaffold your first pages safely. Start here if discovery’s already done.

Once a mesh exists, you stop bootstrapping and switch to the refresh loop (change an input, reconcile) and the lifecycle reference (what each kind of change does to a built page).