# Static Publisher Exporter Setup

Static Publisher depends on a separately installed CLI, `@smart-cloud/publisher-exporter`, for crawl and deployment work. The runner host should have a current LTS Node.js runtime, Playwright browser binaries, shell access, and filesystem access to the plugin runtime directory. AWS credentials are only needed on the machine that actually performs deploy or invalidate steps.

Install the exporter either globally with `npm install -g @smart-cloud/publisher-exporter` followed by `publisher-exporter install-browsers`, or locally with `npx @smart-cloud/publisher-exporter`. On shared runner hosts, set `PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH` to a shared directory before installing browser binaries.

In WordPress admin, set the `External exporter dir` field if you want PHP-side diagnostics to verify the local CLI installation. A practical smoke test is a direct crawl command against a local `publisher.config.json`, followed by `publisher-exporter queue-runner --runtime-dir <runtime-dir> --max-jobs 1` against the WordPress runtime directory.