How do I publish a single org file every time?

Question

I have some code blocks whose output changes based on side-effects e.g. they might be bash scripts that interact with names of files. How do I tell org-publish to publish a certain file every time from within the file?

of course, I can force publish every time but that wastes time when I could selectively force-publish a couple files. I also want it to be from within the file because editing my emacs configuration rather than editing the file I'm already in is more work.

Answer 1

Assuming that the problem you describe is caused by timestamp checking, you can customize org-publish-use-timestamps-flag and set it to nil.

See Triggering Publication in the manual:

14.4 Triggering Publication
===========================

Once properly configured, Org can publish with the following commands:

‘C-c C-e P x’ (‘org-publish’)
     Prompt for a specific project and publish all files that belong to
     it.

‘C-c C-e P p’ (‘org-publish-current-project’)
     Publish the project containing the current file.

‘C-c C-e P f’ (‘org-publish-current-file’)
     Publish only the current file.

‘C-c C-e P a’ (‘org-publish-all’)
     Publish every project.

   Org uses timestamps to track when a file has changed.  The above
functions normally only publish changed files.  You can override this
and force publishing of all files by giving a prefix argument to any of
the commands above, or by customizing the variable
‘org-publish-use-timestamps-flag’.  This may be necessary in particular
if files include other files via ‘SETUPFILE’ or ‘INCLUDE’ keywords.