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How to create a static website for your documentation based on mkdocs and mkdocs-material

MkDocs is a tool built to create static websites from raw markdown files. Other alternatives include Sphinx, and Jekyll.

We used MkDocs to create this playbook.

We found MkDocs to be a good choice since:

  1. It's easy to set up and looks great even with the vanilla version.
  2. It works well with markdown, which is what we already have in the Playbook.
  3. It uses a Python stack which is friendly to many contributors of this Playbook.

For comparison, Sphinx mainly generates docs from restructured-text (rst) format, and Jekyll is written in Ruby.

To setup an MkDocs website, the main assets needed are:

  1. An mkdocs.yaml file, similar to the one we have in the Playbook. This is the configuration file that defines the appearance of the website, the navigation, the plugins used and more.
  2. A folder named docs (the default value for the directory) that contains the documentation source files.
  3. A GitHub Action for automatically generating the website (e.g. on every commit to main), similar to this one from the Playbook.

  4. A list of plugins used during the build phase of the website. We specified ours here. And these are the plugins we've used:

    • Material for MkDocs: Material design appearance and user experience.
    • pymdown-extensions: Improves the appearance of markdown based content.
    • mdx_truly_sane_lists: For defining the indent level for lists without having to refactor the entire documentation we already had in the Playbook.

Setting up locally is very easy. See Getting Started with MkDocs for details.

For publishing the website, there's a good integration with GitHub for storing the website as a GitHub Page.