MkDocs
Project documentation with Markdown.
Overview
MkDocs is a fast, simple and downright gorgeous static site generator that's geared towards building project documentation. Documentation source files are written in Markdown, and configured with a single YAML configuration file.
Host anywhere
MkDocs builds completely static HTML sites that you can host on GitHub pages, Amazon S3, or anywhere else you choose.
Great themes available
There's a stack of good looking themes available for MkDocs. Choose between the built in themes: mkdocs and readthedocs, select one of the 3rd party themes in the MkDocs wiki, or build your own.
Preview your site as you work
The built-in dev-server allows you to preview your documentation as you're writing it. It will even auto-reload and refresh your browser whenever you save your changes.
Easy to customize
Get your project documentation looking just the way you want it by customizing the theme.
Installation
In order to install MkDocs you'll need Python installed on your system, as well as the Python package manager, pip. You can check if you have these already installed from the command line:
$ python --version
Python 2.7.2
$ pip --version
pip 1.5.2
MkDocs supports Python versions 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5.
On Windows it is recommended that you install Python and pip with Chocolatey.
Install the mkdocs
package using pip:
pip install mkdocs
You should now have the mkdocs
command installed on your system. Run mkdocs
--version
to check that everything worked okay.
$ mkdocs --version
mkdocs, version 0.15.3
Getting started
Getting started is super easy.
mkdocs new my-project
cd my-project
Take a moment to review the initial project that has been created for you.
There's a single configuration file named mkdocs.yml
, and a folder named
docs
that will contain your documentation source files. Right now the docs
folder just contains a single documentation page, named index.md
.
MkDocs comes with a built-in dev-server that lets you preview your documentation
as you work on it. Make sure you're in the same directory as the mkdocs.yml
configuration file, and then start the server by running the mkdocs serve
command:
$ mkdocs serve
INFO - Building documentation...
INFO - Cleaning site directory
[I 160402 15:50:43 server:271] Serving on http://127.0.0.1:8000
[I 160402 15:50:43 handlers:58] Start watching changes
[I 160402 15:50:43 handlers:60] Start detecting changes
Open up http://127.0.0.1:8000/
in your browser, and you'll see the default
home page being displayed:
The dev-server also supports auto-reloading, and will rebuild your documentation whenever anything in the configuration file, documentation directory, or theme directory changes.
Open the docs/index.md
document in your text editor of choice, change the
initial heading to MkLorum
, and save your changes. Your browser will
auto-reload and you should see your updated documentation immediately.
Now try editing the configuration file: mkdocs.yml
. Change the
site_name
setting to MkLorum
and save the file.
site_name: MkLorum
Your browser should immediately reload, and you'll see your new site name take effect.
Adding pages
Now add a second page to your documentation:
curl 'https://jaspervdj.be/lorem-markdownum/markdown.txt' > docs/about.md
As our documentation site will include some navigation headers, you may want to
edit the configuration file and add some information about the order, title, and
nesting of each page in the navigation header by adding a pages
setting:
site_name: MkLorum
pages:
- Home: index.md
- About: about.md
Save your changes and you'll now see a navigation bar with Home
and About
items on the left as well as Search
, Previous
, and Next
items on the
right.
Try the menu items and navigate back and forth between pages. Then click on
Search
. A search dialog will appear, allowing you to search for any text on
any page. Notice that the search results include every occurrence of the search
term on the site and links directly to the section of the page in which the
search term appears. You get of all that with no effort or configuration on your
part!
Theming our documentation
Now change the configuration file to alter how the documentation is displayed by
changing the theme. Edit the mkdocs.yml
file and add a theme
setting:
site_name: MkLorum
pages:
- Home: index.md
- About: about.md
theme: readthedocs
Save your changes, and you'll see the ReadTheDocs theme being used.
Building the site
That's looking good. You're ready to deploy the first pass of your MkLorum
documentation. First build the documentation:
mkdocs build
This will create a new directory, named site
. Take a look inside the
directory:
$ ls site
about fonts index.html license search.html
css img js mkdocs sitemap.xml
Notice that your source documentation has been output as two HTML files named
index.html
and about/index.html
. You also have various other media that's
been copied into the site
directory as part of the documentation theme. You
even have a sitemap.xml
file and mkdocs/search_index.json
.
If you're using source code control such as git
you probably don't want to
check your documentation builds into the repository. Add a line containing
site/
to your .gitignore
file.
echo "site/" >> .gitignore
If you're using another source code control tool you'll want to check it's documentation on how to ignore specific directories.
After some time, files may be removed from the documentation but they will still
reside in the site
directory. To remove those stale files, just run mkdocs
with the --clean
switch.
mkdocs build --clean
Other Commands and Options
There are various other commands and options available. For a complete list of
commands, use the --help
flag:
mkdocs --help
To view a list of options available on a given command, use the --help
flag
with that command. For example, to get a list of all options available for the
build
command run the following:
mkdocs build --help
Deploying
The documentation site that you just built only uses static files so you'll be
able to host it from pretty much anywhere. GitHub project pages and Amazon
S3 may be good hosting options, depending upon your needs. Upload the contents
of the entire site
directory to wherever you're hosting your website from and
you're done. For specific instructions on a number of common hosts, see the
Deploying your Docs page.
Getting help
To get help with MkDocs, please use the discussion group, GitHub issues or
the MkDocs IRC channel #mkdocs
on freenode.