---
title: Bengal 0.1.7
description: Fixes for build orchestration, asset discovery, and enhanced deployment health checks
type: changelog
date: 2026-01-03
draft: false
lang: en
tags: [release, changelog, fixes, assets, orchestration, health, deployment]
keywords: [release, 0.1.7, bug fixes, assets, cache, deployment validation, github pages]
category: changelog
---

# Bengal 0.1.7

**Key additions:** Detection for output/cache mismatches, fixes for theme asset discovery in hidden directories, and enhanced health checks for deployment robustness including 0-byte asset detection and GitHub Pages `baseurl` validation.

---

## Highlights

### Build & Cache Reliability

This release addresses critical edge cases discovered in CI environments and complex local setups:

- **Output/Cache Mismatch Detection**: Fixes a bug where Bengal would skip builds if the `.bengal` cache was restored but the output directory (e.g., `public/`) had been cleaned. Bengal now detects missing index files or assets and forces a rebuild automatically.
- **Theme Asset Discovery**: Resolved an issue where theme assets installed in hidden directories (like `.venv`) were incorrectly ignored. The discovery engine now correctly filters hidden files based on their relative path within the assets directory.

### Enhanced Deployment Health Checks

We've added several new validators to catch common deployment "silent failures" before they hit production:

- **Theme-Agnostic Asset Validation**: Asset checks (H621, H626, H627) are now smarter. Instead of looking for specific filenames, they verify that *any* CSS is present and that JS directories aren't empty, making them compatible with all themes.
- **0-Byte Asset Detection**: New checks (H628, H629, H630) identify empty CSS and JS files, which often indicate a failure in bundling or copying that would otherwise result in an unstyled or broken site.
- **Case-Sensitivity Guard**: Asset URL validation now detects case mismatches (e.g., `css/Style.css` vs `css/style.css`). This prevents bugs that "work on my Mac" but fail on case-sensitive Linux CI environments.
- **GitHub Pages Assistant**: Added validation (H012, H013) for GitHub Pages project sites to ensure `baseurl` is correctly configured to match the repository name, preventing common 404 issues on deployment.

---

## Performance & Internal Improvements

- **Thread Safety**: Optimized global context creation with a more efficient locking pattern for Python 3.14 free-threading.
- **Build Quality Score**: Refined the scoring algorithm to include deployment-readiness suggestions.

---

## Upgrading

```bash
uv pip install --upgrade bengal
# or
pip install --upgrade bengal
```

This is a recommended update for all users, especially those deploying via GitHub Actions or using custom themes installed via pip.

---

## Links

- [Documentation](https://github.com/lbliii/bengal)
- [Issue Tracker](https://github.com/lbliii/bengal/issues)
- [Full Changelog](https://github.com/lbliii/bengal/blob/main/changelog.md)
