Contributing to MkDocs
An introduction to contributing to the MkDocs project.
The MkDocs project welcomes, and depends, on contributions from developers and users in the open source community. Contributions can be made in a number of ways, a few examples are:
- Code patches via pull requests
- Documentation improvements
- Bug reports and patch reviews
For information about available communication channels please refer to the README file in our GitHub repository.
Code of Conduct
Everyone interacting in the MkDocs project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms, and mailing lists is expected to follow the PyPA Code of Conduct.
Reporting an Issue
Please include as much detail as you can. Let us know your platform and MkDocs version. If the problem is visual (for example a theme or design issue) please add a screenshot and if you get an error please include the full error and traceback.
Testing the Development Version
If you want to just install and try out the latest development version of MkDocs you can do so with the following command. This can be useful if you want to provide feedback for a new feature or want to confirm if a bug you have encountered is fixed in the git master. It is strongly recommended that you do this within a virtualenv.
pip install https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/archive/master.tar.gz
Installing for Development
First you'll need to fork and clone the repository. Once you have a local copy, run the following command. It is strongly recommended that you do this within a virtualenv.
pip install --editable .
This will install MkDocs in development mode which binds the mkdocs
command
to the git repository.
Running the tests
To run the tests, it is recommended that you use tox.
Install Tox using pip by running the command pip install tox
.
Then the test suite can be run for MkDocs by running the command tox
in the
root of your MkDocs repository.
It will attempt to run the tests against all of the Python versions we support. So don't be concerned if you are missing some and they fail. The rest will be verified by Github Actions when you submit a pull request.
Translating themes
To localize a theme to your favorite language, follow the guide on Translating Themes. We welcome translation Pull Requests!
Submitting Pull Requests
If you're considering a large code contribution to MkDocs, please prefer to open an issue first to get early feedback on the idea.
Once you think the code is ready to be reviewed, push it to your fork and send a pull request. For a change to be accepted it will most likely need to have tests and documentation if it is a new feature.
Submitting changes to the builtin themes
When installed with i18n
support (pip install mkdocs[i18n]
), MkDocs allows
themes to support being translated into various languages (referred to as
locales) if they respect Jinja's i18n extension by wrapping text placeholders
with {% trans %}
and {% endtrans %}
tags.
Each time a translatable text placeholder is added, removed or changed in a
theme template, the theme's Portable Object Template (pot
) file needs to be
updated by running the extract_messages
command. For example, to update the
pot
file of the mkdocs
theme, run the following command:
python setup.py extract_messages -t mkdocs
The updated pot
file should be included in a PR with the updated template.
The updated pot
file will allow translation contributors to propose the
translations needed for their preferred language. See the guide on Translating
Themes for details.
Note
Contributors are not expected to provide translations with their changes to
a theme's templates. However, they are expected to include an updated pot
file so that everything is ready for translators to do their job.