mike
mike is a Python utility that makes it easy to deploy multiple versions of
your MkDocs-powered docs to a Git branch, suitable for
hosting on Github via gh-pages. To see an example of this in action, take a
look at the documentation for bfg9000.
Why Use mike?
mike is built around the idea that once you’ve generated your docs for a
particular version, you should never need to touch that version again. This
means you never have to worry about breaking changes in MkDocs, since your old
docs (built with an old version of MkDocs) are already generated and sitting in
your gh-pages branch.
While mike is flexible, it’s optimized around putting your docs in a
<major>.<minor> directory, with optional aliases (e.g. latest or dev) to
particularly notable versions. This makes it easy to make permalinks to whatever
version of the documentation you want to direct people to.
How It Works
mike works by creating a new Git commit on your gh-pages branch every time you
deploy a new version of your docs using mike deploy (or other mike subcommands
that change your gh-pages branch). When deploying a particular version,
previously-deployed docs for that version are erased and overwritten, but docs
for other versions remain untouched.
Installation
Like most Python projects, mike uses setuptools, so installation
is what you might expect:
pip install mike
Once you’ve installed mike, you might also want to set up shell-completion for
it. If you have shtab installed, you can do this with
mike generate-completion, which will print the shell-completion code for your
shell. For more details on how to set this up, consult shtab’s
documentation.
Usage
Before Using mike
Before using mike for the first time, you may want to use mike delete --all to delete any old documentation on your gh-pages
branch before building your new versioned docs. (If you prefer, you can also
manually move your old documentation to a subdirectory of your gh-pages branch
so that it’s still accessible.)
Configuration
To help integrate into the MkDocs build process, mike uses an MkDocs plugin.
This plugin is added by default when building your documentation with mike, but
by adding it explicitly to your mkdocs.yml file, you can configure how the
plugin works. The plugin adds a version selector to supported themes as well as
updating the site_url (if you set it) to point to the version of the docs that
are being built:
plugins:
- mike:
# These fields are all optional; the defaults are as below...
alias_type: symlink
redirect_template: null
deploy_prefix: ''
canonical_version: null
version_selector: true
css_dir: css
javascript_dir: js
alias_type: The method to create aliases; one of:
symlink: Create a symbolic link from the alias to the base directory of
the documentationredirect: Create an HTML redirect for each page of the documentationcopy: Copy all the files of the documentation to the alias’s path
redirect_template: The template file to use when creating HTML redirects; if
null, use the default templatedeploy_prefix: The root directory to put the generated docs in; this can be
useful if you’d like to have other pages at the root of your site, or to host
multiple, independently-versioned sets of docs side by sidecanonical_version: The “canonical” version to use for the documentation,
useful for telling search engines what pages to prefer (e.g. latest if
you’ve defined that as an alias that always points to the latest release); if
null, mike will use the version specified via mike deployversion_selector: True if the version selector should be shown on pages;
false otherwisecss_dir: The directory to place the version selector’s CSSjavascript_dir: The directory to place the version selector’s Javascript
Building Your Docs
mike is designed to produce one version of your docs at a time. That way, you
can easily deploy a new version without touching any older versions of your
docs; this can be especially important if your old docs are no longer buildable
with the newest version of MkDocs (or if they weren’t built with MkDocs at
all!). To deploy the current version of your docs, simply run:
mike deploy [version]
Where [version] is the current version of your project, represented however
you like (I recommend using [major].[minor] and excluding the patch
number). You can also pass aliases to the deploy command to host a
particularly-relevant version of your docs somewhere special (e.g. latest):
mike deploy [version] [alias]...
If [version] already exists, this command will also update all of the
pre-existing aliases for it. Normally, if an alias specified on the command line
is already associated with another version, this will return an error. If you
do want to move an alias from another version to this version (including
when the new version itself was previously an alias), you can pass
-u/--update-aliases to allow this. For example, this can be useful when
releasing a new version and updating the latest alias to point to this new
version.
By default, each alias creates a symbolic link to the base directory of the real
version of the docs; to create a copy of the docs for each alias, you can pass
--alias-type=copy, or to use a simple HTML redirect for each page, you can
pass --alias-type=redirect. If you’re using redirects, you can customize the
redirect template with -T/--template; this takes a path to a Jinja
template that accepts an {{href}} variable.
If you’d like to specify a title for this version that doesn’t match the version
string, you can pass -t TITLE/--title=TITLE as well. You can set custom
properties for this version as well, using --prop-set, --prop-set-string,
--prop-set-all, --prop-delete, and --prop-delete-all (see the Managing
Properties section for more details).
In addition, you can specify where to deploy your docs via -b/--branch,
-r/--remote, and --deploy-prefix, specifying the branch, remote, and
directory prefix within the branch, respectively. Finally, to push your docs to
a remote branch, simply add -p/--push to your command.
You can also specify many of these options via your mkdocs.yml configuration
as shown above. For example, --alias-type can also be specified via
plugins.mike.alias_type. (For --branch and --remote, you can use the
built-in MkDocs fields remote_branch and remote_name.)
Viewing Your Docs
When editing your documentation, you can usually just use the ordinary mkdocs serve to show the genereated results. This serves the current
version of your documentation without forcing you to create a Git commit first
via mike deploy.
If you want to test all the versions of your documentation as you’d see on your
production server, you can serve them locally via:
mike serve
This serves your current documentation as committed to your gh-pages branch.
By default, it serves the docs at http://localhost:8000, but you can change
this with -a/--dev-addr.
[!CAUTION]
mike serve and mkdocs serve should be used for testing only. To host
your docs for real, use a real web server.
Deleting Docs
Sometimes you need to delete an old version of your docs, either because you
made a mistake or you’re pruning unsupported versions. You can do this via the
delete subcommand:
mike delete [identifier]...
If identifier is a version, this will delete the version and all its aliases
from the branch; if it’s an alias, it will only delete that alias.
If you’d like to completely wipe the contents of your docs branch, just run
mike delete --all. Like deploy above, you can specify --branch, --push,
etc to control how the commit is handled.
Listing Docs
If you ever need to see the list of all currently-deployed doc versions, you can
run:
mike list
To list the info for a particular version, you can just pass the version name or
an alias to that version:
mike list [identifier]
Sometimes, you need this information to be consumed by another tool. In that
case, pass -j/--json to return the list of doc versions as JSON.
Setting the Default Version
With all the versions of docs you have, you may want to set a default version
so that people going to the root of your site are redirected to the latest
version of the docs:
mike set-default [identifier]
Normally, this command will return an error if identifier doesn’t exist. If
you want to set the default to a version that doesn’t exist yet, you can pass
--allow-undefined.
If you want to use a different template from the default, you can pass
-T/--template; this takes a path to a Jinja template that accepts
an {{href}} variable. (Note that this page always uses a redirect, no matter
the setting of alias_type/--alias-type.)
Like deploy and delete above, you can specify --branch, --push,
etc to control how the commit is handled.
Changing a Version’s Title
As you update your docs, you may want to change the title of a particular
version. For example, your 1.0 docs might have the title 1.0.0, and when you
release a new patch, you want to update the title to 1.0.1. You can do this
with the retitle command:
mike retitle [identifier] [title]
As with other commands that change your docs, you can specify --branch,
--push, etc to control how the commit is handled.
Adding a New Version Alias
Sometimes, you might need to add a new alias for a version without rebuilding
your documentation. You can use the alias command for this:
mike alias [identifier] [alias]...
As with deploy, you can pass -u/--update-aliases to change where an
existing alias points to.
Once again, you can specify --branch, --push, etc to control how the commit
is handled.
Managing Properties
Each version of your documentation can have any arbitrary properties assigned to
it that you like. You can use these properties to hold extra metadata, and then
your documentation theme can consult those properties to do whatever you like.
When using the built-in MkDocs themes, mike supports one property: hidden.
When this is true, that version will be hidden from the version selector
(unless it’s the current version).
You can get properties via props command:
mike props [identifier] [prop]
If prop is specified, this will return the value of that property; otherwise,
it will return all of that version’s properties as a JSON object.
You can also set properties by specifying one or more of --set prop=json,
--set-string prop=str, --set-all json, --delete prop, and --delete-all.
(If you prefer, you can also set properties at the same time as deploying via
the --prop-* options.)
When getting or setting a particular property, you can specify it with a
limited JSONPath-like syntax. You can use bare field names, quoted field
names, and indices/field names inside square brackets. The only operator
supported is .. For example, this is a valid expression:
foo."bar"[0]["baz"]
When setting values, you can add to the head or tail of a list via the head
or tail keywords, e.g.:
foo[head]
As usual, you can specify --branch, --push, etc to control how the commit is
handled.
More Details
For more details on the available options, consult the --help command for
mike.
Version Ordering
There are lots of versioning schemes out there, but mike tries its best to order
your versions in a reasonable manner. Version identifiers that “look like”
versions (e.g. 1.2.3, 1.0b1, v1.0) are treated as ordinary versions,
whereas other identifiers, like devel, are treated as development versions,
and placed above ordinary versions.
The above scheme should get things right most of the time, but you can always
post-process your versions.json file to manipulate the ordering to suit your
needs.
Staying in Sync
mike will do its best to stay in-sync with your remote repository and will
automatically update your local branch to match the remote’s if possible (note
that mike won’t automatically git fetch anything). If your local branch has
diverged from your remote, mike will leave it as-is and ask you what to do. To
ignore the remote’s state, just pass --ignore-remote-status.
CNAME (and Other Special Files)
Some special files that you’d like to deploy along with your documentation (such
as CNAME) aren’t related to a particular version of the docs, and instead need
to go in the root directory of your site. There’s no special handling for this
in mike, but since your built docs live on a Git branch, it’s still easy to
manage: check out your gh-pages branch (or wherever your built docs
live), and commit the necessary files to the root directory.
Deploying via CI
Since mike just generates commits to an ordinary Git branch, it should work
smoothly with your favorite CI system. However, you should keep in mind that
some CI systems make shallow clones of your repository, meaning that the CI job
won’t have a local instance of your documentation branch to commit to. This will
naturally cause issues when trying to push the commit. This is easy to resolve
though; just manually fetch your gh-pages branch (or whichever you deploy to)
before running mike:
git fetch origin gh-pages --depth=1
You may also need to configure a Git user so that mike can
make commits:
git config user.name ci-bot
git config user.email [email protected]
Alternately, you can set the environment variables GIT_COMMITTER_NAME and
GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL (as well as GIT_COMMITTER_DATE if you like):
GIT_COMMITTER_NAME=ci-bot [email protected] \
mike deploy 1.0
For Theme Authors
If you’d like to provide support for mike in your theme, you just need to
fetch versions.json and build a version selector. versions.json looks like
this:
[
{"version": "1.0", "title": "1.0.1", "aliases": ["latest"]},
{"version": "0.9", "title": "0.9", "aliases": [], "properties": "anything"}
]
Every version has a version string, a title (which may be the same as
version), a list of aliases, and optionally, a properties attribute that
can hold anything at all. These properties can be used by other packages,
themes, etc in order to add their own custom metadata to each version.
If you’re creating a third-party extension to an existing theme, you add a
setuptools entry point for mike.themes pointing to a Python submodule that
contains css/ and js/ subdirectories containing the extra code to be
installed into the user’s documentation. This will then automatically be
included via the mike plugin in the user’s mkdocs.yml file.
To see some examples of how to work with this, check the
mike/themes/mkdocs directory.
License
This project is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license.
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