Release Notes¶

Upgrading¶

To upgrade MkDocs to the latest version, use pip:

pip install -U mkdocs

You can determine your currently installed version using mkdocs --version:

$ mkdocs --version
mkdocs, version 1.0 from /path/to/mkdocs (Python 3.6)

Maintenance team¶

The current and past members of the MkDocs team.

• @tomchristie
• @d0ugal
• @waylan
• @oprypin
• @ultrabug

Version 1.4.2 (2022-11-01)¶

• Officially support Python 3.11 (#3020)

  Tip:

  Simply upgrading to Python 3.11 can cut off 10-15% of your site's build time.

• Support multiple instances of the same plugin (#3027)

  If a plugin is specified multiple times in the list under the plugins: config, that will create 2 (or more) instances of the plugin with their own config each.

  Previously this case was unforeseen and, as such, bugged.

  Now even though this works, by default a warning will appear from MkDocs anyway, unless the plugin adds a class variable supports_multiple_instances = True.

• Bugfix (regression in 1.4.1): Don't error when a plugin puts a plain string into warnings (#3016)

• Bugfix: Relative links will always render with a trailing slash (#3022)

  Previously under use_directory_urls, links from a sub-page to the main index page rendered as e.g. <a href="../.."> even though in all other cases the links look like <a href="../../">. This caused unwanted behavior on some combinations of Web browsers and servers. Now this special-case bug was removed.

• Built-in "mkdocs" theme now also supports Norwegian language (#3024)

• Plugin-related warnings look more readable (#3016)

See commit log.

Version 1.4.1 (2022-10-15)¶

• Support theme-namespaced plugin loading (#2998)

  Plugins' entry points can be named as 'sometheme/someplugin'. That will have the following outcome:

  • If the current theme is 'sometheme', the plugin 'sometheme/someplugin' will always be preferred over 'someplugin'.
  • If the current theme isn't 'sometheme', the only way to use this plugin is by specifying plugins: [sometheme/someplugin].

  One can also specify plugins: ['/someplugin'] instead of plugins: ['someplugin'] to definitely avoid the theme-namespaced plugin.

• Bugfix: mkdocs serve will work correctly with non-ASCII paths and redirects (#3001)

• Windows: 'colorama' is now a dependency of MkDocs, to ensure colorful log output (#2987)

• Plugin-related config options have more reliable validation and error reporting (#2997)

• Translation sub-commands of setup.py were completely dropped. See documentation [1] [2] for their new replacements (#2990)

• The 'mkdocs' package (wheel and source) is now produced by Hatch build system and pyproject.toml instead of setup.py (#2988)

Other small improvements; see commit log.

Version 1.4.0 (2022-09-27)¶

Feature upgrades¶

Hooks (#2978)¶

The new hooks: config allows you to add plugin-like event handlers from local Python files, without needing to set up and install an actual plugin.

See documentation.

edit_uri flexibility (#2927)¶

There is a new edit_uri_template: config.
It works like edit_uri but more generally covers ways to construct an edit URL.
See documentation.

Additionally, the edit_uri functionality will now fully work even if repo_url is omitted (#2928)

Upgrades for plugin developers¶

Customize event order for plugin event handlers (#2973)¶

Plugins can now choose to set a priority value for their event handlers. This can override the old behavior where for each event type, the handlers are called in the order that their plugins appear in the plugins config.

If this is set, events with higher priority are called first. Events without a chosen priority get a default of 0. Events that have the same priority are ordered as they appear in the config.

Recommended priority values: 100 "first", 50 "early", 0 "default", -50 "late", -100 "last".
As different plugins discover more precise relations to each other, the values should be further tweaked.

See documentation.

New events that persist across builds in mkdocs serve (#2972)¶

The new events are on_startup and on_shutdown. They run at the very beginning and very end of an mkdocs invocation.
on_startup also receives information on how mkdocs was invoked (e.g. serve --dirtyreload).

See documentation.

Replace File.src_path to not deal with backslashes (#2930)¶

The property src_path uses backslashes on Windows, which doesn't make sense as it's a virtual path.
To not make a breaking change, there's no change to how this property is used, but now you should:

• Use File.src_uri instead of File.src_path
• and File.dest_uri instead of File.dest_path.

These consistently use forward slashes, and are now the definitive source that MkDocs itself uses.

See source code.

As a related tip: you should also stop using os.path.* or pathlib.Path() to deal with these paths, and instead use posixpath.* or pathlib.PurePosixPath()

MkDocs is type-annotated, ready for use with mypy (#2941, #2970)¶

Type annotations for event handler methods (#2931)¶

MkDocs' plugin event methods now have type annotations. You might have been adding annotations to events already, but now they will be validated to match the original.

See source code and documentation.

One big update is that now you should annotate method parameters more specifically as config: defaults.MkDocsConfig instead of config: base.Config. This not only makes it clear that it is the main config of MkDocs itself, but also provides type-safe access through attributes of the object (see next section).

See source code and documentation.

Rework ConfigOption schemas as class-based (#2962)¶

When developing a plugin, the settings that it accepts used to be specified in the config_scheme variable on the plugin class.
This approach is now soft-deprecated, and instead you should specify the config in a sub-class of base.Config.

Old example:

from mkdocs import plugins
from mkdocs.config import base, config_options

class MyPlugin(plugins.BasePlugin):
    config_scheme = (
        ('foo', config_options.Type(int)),
        ('bar', config_options.Type(str, default='')),
    )

    def on_page_markdown(self, markdown: str, *, config: base.Config, **kwargs):
        if self.config['foo'] < 5:
            if config['site_url'].startswith('http:'):
                return markdown + self.config['baz']

This code snippet actually has many mistakes but it will pass all type checks and silently run and even succeed in some cases.

So, on to the new equivalent example, changed to new-style schema and attribute-based access:
(Complaints from "mypy" added inline)

from mkdocs import plugins
from mkdocs.config import base, config_options as c

class MyPluginConfig(base.Config):
    foo = c.Optional(c.Type(int))
    bar = c.Type(str, default='')

class MyPlugin(plugins.BasePlugin[MyPluginConfig]):
    def on_page_markdown(self, markdown: str, *, config: base.MkDocsConfig, **kwargs):
        if self.config.foo < 5:  # Error, `foo` might be `None`, need to check first.
            if config.site_url.startswith('http:'):  # Error, MkDocs' `site_url` also might be `None`.
                return markdown + self.config.baz  # Error, no such attribute `baz`!

This lets you notice the errors from a static type checker before running the code and fix them as such:

class MyPlugin(plugins.BasePlugin[MyPluginConfig]):
    def on_page_markdown(self, markdown: str, *, config: base.MkDocsConfig, **kwargs):
        if self.config.foo is not None and self.config.foo < 5:  # OK, `int < int` is valid.
            if (config.site_url or '').startswith('http:'):  # OK, `str.startswith(str)` is valid.
                return markdown + self.config.bar  # OK, `str + str` is valid.

See documentation.

Also notice that we had to explicitly mark the config attribute foo as Optional.
The new-style config has all attributes marked as required by default, and specifying required=False or required=True is not allowed!

New: config_options.Optional (#2962)¶

Wrapping something into Optional is conceptually similar to "I want the default to be None" -- and you have to express it like that, because writing default=None doesn't actually work.

Breaking change: the method BaseConfigOption.is_required() was removed. Use .required instead. (#2938)
And even the required property should be mostly unused now.
For class-based configs, there's a new definition for whether an option is "required":

• It has no default, and
• It is not wrapped into config_options.Optional.

New: config_options.ListOfItems (#2938)¶

Defines a list of items that each must adhere to the same constraint. Kind of like a validated Type(list)

Examples how to express a list of integers (with from mkdocs.config import config_options as c):

See more examples in documentation.

Updated: config_options.SubConfig (#2807)¶

SubConfig used to silently ignore all validation of its config options. Now you should pass validate=True to it or just use new class-based configs where this became the default.

So, it can be used to validate a nested sub-dict with all keys pre-defined and value types strictly validated.

See examples in documentation.

Other changes to config options¶

URL's default is now None instead of ''. This can still be checked for truthiness in the same way - if config.some_url: (#2962)

FilesystemObject is no longer abstract and can be used directly, standing for "file or directory" with optional existence checking (#2938)

Bug fixes:

• Fix SubConfig, ConfigItems, MarkdownExtensions to not leak values across different instances (#2916, #2290)
• SubConfig raises the correct kind of validation error without a stack trace (#2938)
• Fix dot-separated redirect in config_options.Deprecated(moved_to) (#2963)

Tweaked logic for handling ConfigOption.default (#2938)

Deprecated config option classes: ConfigItems (#2983), OptionallyRequired (#2962), RepoURL (#2927)

Theme updates¶

• Styles of admonitions in "MkDocs" theme (#2981):

  • Update colors to increase contrast
  • Apply admonition styles also to <details> tag, to support Markdown extensions that provide it (pymdownx.details, callouts)

• Built-in themes now also support these languages:

  • Russian (#2976)
  • Turkish (Turkey) (#2946)
  • Ukrainian (#2980)

Future compatibility¶

• extra_css: and extra_javascript: warn if a backslash \ is passed to them. (#2930, #2984)

• Show DeprecationWarnings as INFO messages. (#2907)

  If any plugin or extension that you use relies on deprecated functionality of other libraries, it is at risk of breaking in the near future. Plugin developers should address these in a timely manner.

• Avoid a dependency on importlib_metadata starting from Python 3.10 (#2959)

• Drop support for Python 3.6 (#2948)

Incompatible changes to public APIs¶

• mkdocs.utils:
  • create_media_urls and normalize_url warn if a backslash \ is passed to them. (#2930)
  • is_markdown_file stops accepting case-insensitive variants such as .MD, which is how MkDocs build was already operating. (#2912)
  • Hard-deprecated: modified_time, reduce_list, get_html_path, get_url_path, is_html_file, is_template_file. (#2912)

Miscellaneous¶

• If a plugin adds paths to watch in LiveReloadServer, it can now unwatch them. (#2777)

• Bugfix (regression in 1.2): Support listening on an IPv6 address in mkdocs serve. (#2951)

Other small improvements; see commit log.

Version 1.3.1 (2022-07-19)¶

• Pin Python-Markdown version to <3.4, thus excluding its latest release that breaks too many external extensions (#2893)

• When a Markdown extension fails to load, print its name and traceback (#2894)

• Bugfix for "readthedocs" theme (regression in 1.3.0): add missing space in breadcrumbs (#2810)

• Bugfix: don't complain when a file "readme.md" (lowercase) exists, it's not recognized otherwise (#2852)

• Built-in themes now also support these languages:

  • Italian (#2860)

Other small improvements; see commit log.

Version 1.3.0 (2022-03-26)¶

Feature upgrades¶

• ReadTheDocs theme updated from v0.4.1 to v1.0.0 according to upstream (#2585)

  The most notable changes:

  • New option logo: Rather than displaying the site_name in the title, one can specify a path to an image to display instead.
  • New option anonymize_ip for Google Analytics.
  • Dependencies were upgraded: jQuery upgraded to 3.6.0, Modernizr.js dropped, and others.

  See documentation of config options for the theme

• Built-in themes now also support these languages:

  • German (#2633)
  • Persian (Farsi) (#2787)

• Support custom directories to watch when running mkdocs serve (#2642)

  MkDocs by default watches the docs directory and the config file. Now there is a way to add more directories to watch for changes, either via the YAML watch key or the command line flag --watch.

  Normally MkDocs never reaches into any other directories (so this feature shouldn't be necessary), but some plugins and extensions may do so.

  See documentation.

• New --no-history option for gh_deploy (#2594)

  Allows to discard the history of commits when deploying, and instead replace it with one root commit

Bug fixes¶

• An XSS vulnerability when using the search function in built-in themes was fixed (#2791)

• Setting the edit_uri option no longer erroneously adds a trailing slash to repo_url (#2733)

Miscellaneous¶

• Breaking change: the pages config option that was deprecated for a very long time now causes an error when used (#2652)

  To fix the error, just change from pages to nav.

• Performance optimization: during startup of MkDocs, code and dependencies of other commands will not be imported (#2714)

  The most visible effect of this is that dependencies of mkdocs serve will not be imported when mkdocs build is used.

• Recursively validate nav (#2680)

  Validation of the nested nav structure has been reworked to report errors early and reliably. Some edge cases have been declared invalid.

Other small improvements; see commit log.

Version 1.2.4 (2022-03-26)¶

• Compatibility with Jinja2 3.1.0 (#2800)

  Due to a breaking change in Jinja2, MkDocs would crash with the message AttributeError: module 'jinja2' has no attribute 'contextfilter'

Version 1.2.3 (2021-10-12)¶

• Built-in themes now also support these languages:

  • Simplified Chinese (#2497)
  • Japanese (#2525)
  • Brazilian Portuguese (#2535)
  • Spanish (#2545, previously #2396)

• Third-party plugins will take precedence over built-in plugins with the same name (#2591)

• Bugfix: Fix ability to load translations for some languages: core support (#2565) and search plugin support with fallbacks (#2602)

• Bugfix (regression in 1.2): Prevent directory traversal in the dev server (#2604)

• Bugfix (regression in 1.2): Prevent webserver warnings from being treated as a build failure in strict mode (#2607)

• Bugfix: Correctly print colorful messages in the terminal on Windows (#2606)

• Bugfix: Python version 3.10 was displayed incorrectly in --version (#2618)

Other small improvements; see commit log.

Version 1.2.2 (2021-07-18)¶

• Bugfix (regression in 1.2): Fix serving files/paths with Unicode characters (#2464)

• Bugfix (regression in 1.2): Revert livereload file watching to use polling observer (#2477)

  This had to be done to reasonably support usages that span virtual filesystems such as non-native Docker and network mounts.

  This goes back to the polling approach, very similar to that was always used prior, meaning most of the same downsides with latency and CPU usage.

• Revert from 1.2: Remove the requirement of a site_url config and the restriction on use_directory_urls (#2490)

• Bugfix (regression in 1.2): Don't require trailing slash in the URL when serving a directory index in mkdocs serve server (#2507)

  Instead of showing a 404 error, detect if it's a directory and redirect to a path with a trailing slash added, like before.

• Bugfix: Fix gh_deploy with config-file in the current directory (#2481)

• Bugfix: Fix reversed breadcrumbs in "readthedocs" theme (#2179)

• Allow "mkdocs.yaml" as the file name when '--config' is not passed (#2478)

• Stop treating ";" as a special character in URLs: urlparse -> urlsplit (#2502)

• Improve build performance for sites with many pages (partly already done in 1.2) (#2407)

Version 1.2.1 (2021-06-09)¶

• Bugfix (regression in 1.2): Ensure 'gh-deploy' always pushes.

Version 1.2 (2021-06-04)¶

Major Additions to Version 1.2¶

Support added for Theme Localization (#2299)¶

The mkdocs and readthedocs themes now support language localization using the theme.locale parameter, which defaults to en (English). The only other supported languages in this release are fr (French) and es (Spanish). For details on using the provided translations, see the user guide. Note that translation will not happen by default. Users must first install the necessary dependencies with the following command:

pip install mkdocs[i18n]

Translation contributions are welcome and detailed in the Translation Guide.

Developers of third party themes may want to review the relevant section of the Theme Development Guide.

Contributors who are updating the templates to the built-in themes should review the Contributing Guide.

The lang setting of the search plugin now defaults to the language specified in theme.locale.

Support added for Environment Variables in the configuration file (#1954)¶

Environments variables may now be specified in the configuration file with the !ENV tag. The value of the variable will be parsed by the YAML parser and converted to the appropriate type.

somekey: !ENV VAR_NAME
otherkey: !ENV [VAR_NAME, FALLBACK_VAR, 'default value']

See Environment Variables in the Configuration documentation for details.

Support added for Configuration Inheritance (#2218)¶

A configuration file may now inherit from a parent configuration file. In the primary file set the INHERIT key to the relative path of the parent file.

INHERIT: path/to/base.yml

The two files will then be deep merged. See Configuration Inheritance for details.

Update gh-deploy command (#2170)¶

The vendored (and modified) copy of ghp_import has been replaced with a dependency on the upstream library. As of version 1.0.0, ghp-import includes a Python API which makes it possible to call directly.

MkDocs can now benefit from recent bug fixes and new features, including the following:

• A .nojekyll file is automatically included when deploying to GitHub Pages.
• The --shell flag is now available, which reportedly works better on Windows.
• Git author and committer environment variables should be respected (#1383).

Rework auto-reload and HTTP server for mkdocs serve (#2385)¶

mkdocs serve now uses a new underlying server + file watcher implementation, based on http.server from standard library and watchdog. It provides similar functionality to the previously used livereload library (which is now dropped from dependencies, along with tornado).

This makes reloads more responsive and consistent in terms of timing. Multiple rapid file changes no longer cause the site to repeatedly rebuild (issue #2061).

Almost every aspect of the server is slightly different, but actual visible changes are minor. The logging outputs are only similar to the old ones. Degradations in behavior are not expected, and should be reported if found.

Offset the local site root according to the sub-path of the site_url (#2424)¶

When using mkdocs serve and having the site_url specified as e.g. http://example.org/sub/path/, now the root of the locally served site becomes http://127.0.0.1:8000/sub/path/ and all document paths are offset accordingly.

A build_error event was added (#2103)¶

Plugin developers can now use the on_build_error hook to execute code when an exception is raised while building the site.

See on_build_error in the Plugins documentation for details.

Three new exceptions: BuildError PluginError and Abort (#2103)¶

MkDocs now has tree new exceptions defined in mkdocs.exceptions: BuildError, PluginError, and Abort:

• PluginError can be raised from a plugin to stop the build and log an error message without traceback.
• BuildError should not be used by third-party plugins developers and is reserved for internal use only.
• Abort is used internally to abort the build and display an error without a traceback.

See Handling errors in the Plugins documentation for details.

Search Indexing Strategy configuration¶

Users can now specify which strategy they wish to use when indexing their site for search. A user can select between the following options:

• full: Adds page title, section headings, and full page text to the search index.
• sections: Adds page titles and section headings only to the search index.
• titles: Adds only the page titles to the search index.

See Search Indexing in the configuration documentation for details.

Backward Incompatible Changes in 1.2¶

• The site_url configuration option is now required. If it is not set, a warning will be issued. In a future release an error will be raised (#2189).

  The use_directory_urls configuration option will be forced to false if site_url is set to an empty string. In that case, if use_directory_urls is not explicitly set to false, a warning will be issued (#2189).

  Note

  This was reverted in release 1.2.2

• The google_analytics configuration option is deprecated as Google appears to be phasing it out in favor of its new Google Analytics 4 property. See the documentation for your theme for alternatives which can be configured as part of your theme configuration. For example, the mkdocs and readthedocs themes have each added a new theme.analytics.gtag configuration option which uses the new Google Analytics 4 property. See Google's documentation on how to Upgrade to a Google Analytics 4 property. Then set theme.analytics.gtag to the "G-" ID and delete the google_analytics configuration option which contains a "UA-" ID. So long as the old "UA-" ID and new "G-" ID are properly linked in your Google account, and you are using the "G-" ID, the data will be made available in both the old and new formats by Google Analytics. See #2252.

• A theme's files are now excluded from the list of watched files by default when using the --livereload server. This new default behavior is what most users need and provides better performance when editing site content. Theme developers can enable the old behavior with the --watch-theme option. (#2092).

• The mkdocs theme now removes the sidebar when printing a page. This frees up horizontal space for better rendering of content like tables (#2193).

• The mkdocs.config.DEFAULT_SCHEMA global variable has been replaced with the function mkdocs.config.defaults.get_schema(), which ensures that each instance of the configuration is unique (#2289).

• The mkdocs.utils.warning_filter is deprecated and now does nothing. Plugins should remove any reference to is as it may be deleted in a future release. To ensure any warnings get counted, simply log them to the mkdocs log (i.e.: mkdocs.plugins.pluginname).

• The on_serve event (which receives the server object and the builder function) is affected by the server rewrite. server is now a mkdocs.livereload.LiveReloadServer instead of livereload.server.Server. The typical action that plugins can do with these is to call server.watch(some_dir, builder), which basically adds that directory to watched directories, causing the site to be rebuilt on file changes. That still works, but passing any other function to watch is deprecated and shows a warning. This 2^nd parameter is already optional, and will accept only this exact builder function just for compatibility.

• The python method of the plugins.search.prebuild_index configuration option is pending deprecation as of version 1.2. It is expected that in version 1.3 it will raise a warning if used and in version 1.4 it will raise an error. Users are encouraged to use an alternate method to generate a prebuilt index for search.

• The lunr and lunr[languages] dependencies are no longer installed by default. The dependencies are only needed for the rare user who pre-builds the search index and uses the python option, which is now pending deprecation. If you use this feature, then you will need to manually install lunr and lunr[languages]. A warning is issued if the dependencies are needed but not installed.

Other Changes and Additions to Version 1.2¶

• Bugfix: Properly process navigation child items in _get_by_type when filtering for sections (#2203).
• Official support for Python 3.9 has been added and support for Python 3.5 has been dropped.
• Bugfix: Fixes an issue that would result in a partially cut-off navigation item in the ReadTheDocs theme (#2297).
• Structure Files object now has a remove method to help plugin developers manipulate the Files tree. The corresponding src_paths has become a property to accommodate this possible dynamic behavior. See #2305.
• Updated highlight.js to 10.5.0. See #2313.
• Bugfix: Search plugin now works with Japanese language. See #2178.
• Documentation has been refactored (#1629).
• Restore styling of tables in the readthedocs theme (#2028).
• Ensure site_url ends with a slash (#1785).
• Correct documentation of pages template context variable (#1736).
• The lunr dependency has been updated to 0.5.9, and lunr.js to the corresponding 2.3.9 version (#2306).
• Color is now used in log messages to identify errors, warnings and debug messages.
• Bugfix: Identify homepage when use_directory_urls is False (#2362).

Version 1.1.2 (2020-05-14)¶

• Bugfix: Normalize IP addresses and change unsupported address error to a warning (#2108).

Version 1.1.1 (2020-05-12)¶

• Bugfix: Allow compressed sitemap to be deterministic by supporting the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable (#2100).
• Bugfix: Use README.md as index.html even if use_directory_urls is false (#2081).
• Bugfix: Ignore links which start with a backslash (#1680).
• Bugfix: Pass builder to the on_serve event so that it can be passed to server.watch by plugins (#1952).
• Bugfix: Use lunr[languages]==0.5.8 to avoid nltk incompatibilities (#2062).
• Bugfix: Ensure wheel is Python 3 only (#2021).
• Bugfix: Clean up dev_addr validation and disallow 0.0.0.0 (#2022).
• Add support for min_search_length parameter for search plugin (#2014).
• Bugfix: readthedocs theme code colors (#2027).

Version 1.1 (2020-02-22)¶

Major Additions to Version 1.1¶

Support for Lunr.py as prebuild_index engine¶

Mkdocs now supports pre-building indices using Lunr.py, a pure Python implementation of Lunr.js, allowing the user to avoid installing a NodeJS environment if so desired. For more information please read the prebuild_index documentation.

readthedocs theme updated with upstream (#588 and #1374)¶

The readthedocs theme now more closely matches the upstream Sphinx theme (version 0.4.1). A number of new theme configuration settings were added which mirror the upstream configuration options. See the theme documentation for details.

Update mkdocs theme to Bootswatch 4.1.3 (#1563)¶

The mkdocs theme now supports all the features of Bootswatch 4.1. Additionally, 2 filenames were changed in this update. If you are using a theme which inherits from the mkdocs theme, the theme developer may need to update these filenames as follows.

css/bootstrap-custom.min.css => css/bootstrap.min.css
js/bootstrap-3.0.3.min.js => js/bootstrap.min.js

Improved configuration support on the command line (#1401)¶

The build, serve, and gh-deploy subcommands now support flags to control whether directory URLs should be created: --use-directory-urls / --no-directory-urls. In addition, the gh-deploy subcommand now supports all the configuration options that build and serve do, adding --strict, --theme, --theme-dir, and --site-dir.

Updated lunr-languages support (#1729)¶

The lunr-languages plugin has been updated to 1.4.0, adding support for Arabic (ar) and Vietnamese (vi) languages. In addition, the Dutch and Japanese language codes have been changed to their standard values: nl and ja, respectively. The old language codes (du and jp) remain as aliases but may be removed in a future version of MkDocs.

Other Changes and Additions to Version 1.1¶

• Bugfix: Ensure nested dot files in themes are ignored and document behavior (#1981).
• Update minimum dependency to Markdown 3.2.1.
• Updated minimum dependency to Jinja 2.10.1 to address security concerns (#1780).
• Update to lunr.js 2.3.8 (#1989).
• Add support for Python 3.8.
• Drop support for Python 3.4.
• Drop support for Python 2.7. MkDocs is PY3 only now (#1926).
• Bugfix: Select appropriate asyncio event loop on Windows for Python 3.8+ (#1885).
• Bugfix: Ensure nested index pages do not get identified as the homepage (#1919).
• Bugfix: Properly identify deployment version (#1879).
• Bugfix: Properly build ValidationError message for custom_dir (#1849).
• Bugfix: Exclude Markdown files and READMEs from theme (#1766).
• Bugfix: Account for encoded URLs (#1670).
• Bugfix: Ensure theme files do not override docs_dir files (#1671).
• Bugfix: Do not normalize URL fragments (#1655).
• Bugfix: Skip external URLs in sitemap.xml (#1742).
• Bugfix: Ensure theme files do not override docs_dir files on Windows (#1876)
• Add canonical tag to readthedocs theme (#1669).
• Improved error message for when git is not available.
• Add support for nav_style theme option for the mkdocs theme (#1930).
• Bugfix: Long/nested dropdowns now behave more consistently for the mkdocs theme (#1234).
• Bugfix: Multi-row nav headers in the mkdocs theme no longer obscure the document content (#716).
• Add support for navigation_depth theme option for the mkdocs theme (#1970).
• level attribute in page.toc items is now 1-indexed to match the level in <hN> tags (#1970).

Version 1.0.4 (2018-09-07)¶

• Bugfix: Ignore absolute links in Markdown (#1621).

Version 1.0.3 (2018-08-29)¶

• Bugfix: Warn on relative paths in navigation (#1604).
• Bugfix: Handle empty theme_config.yml files correctly (#1602).

Version 1.0.2 (2018-08-22)¶

• Bugfix: Provide absolute base_url to error templates (#1598).

Version 1.0.1 (2018-08-13)¶

• Bugfix: Prevent page reload when [Enter] is pressed in search box (#1589).
• Bugfix: Avoid calling search until all assets are ready (#1584).
• Bugfix: Exclude README.md if index.md is present (#1580).
• Bugfix: Fix readthedocs theme navigation bug with homepage (#1576).

Version 1.0 (2018-08-03)¶

Major Additions to Version 1.0¶

Internal Refactor of Pages, Files, and Navigation¶

Internal handling of pages, files and navigation has been completely refactored. The changes included in the refactor are summarized below.

• Support for hidden pages. All Markdown pages are now included in the build regardless of whether they are included in the navigation configuration (#699).
• The navigation can now include links to external sites (#989 #1373 & #1406).
• Page data (including titles) is properly determined for all pages before any page is rendered (#1347).
• Automatically populated navigation now sorts index pages to the top. In other words, The index page will be listed as the first child of a directory, while all other documents are sorted alphanumerically by file name after the index page (#73 & #1042).
• A README.md file is now treated as an index file within a directory and will be rendered to index.html (#608).
• The URLs for all files are computed once and stored in a files collection. This ensures all internal links are always computed correctly regardless of the configuration. This also allows all internal links to be validated, not just links to other Markdown pages. (#842 & #872).
• A new url template filter smartly ensures all URLs are relative to the current page (#1526).
• An on_files plugin event has been added, which could be used to include files not in the docs_dir, exclude files, redefine page URLs (i.e. implement extensionless URLs), or to manipulate files in various other ways.

Backward Incompatible Changes¶

As part of the internal refactor, a number of backward incompatible changes have been introduced, which are summarized below.

URLs have changed when use_directory_urls is False¶

Previously, all Markdown pages would be have their filenames altered to be index pages regardless of how the use_directory_urls setting was configured. However, the path munging is only needed when use_directory_urls is set to True (the default). The path mangling no longer happens when use_directory_urls is set to False, which will result in different URLs for all pages that were not already index files. As this behavior only effects a non-default configuration, and the most common user-case for setting the option to False is for local file system (file://) browsing, its not likely to effect most users. However, if you have use_directory_urls set to False for a MkDocs site hosted on a web server, most of your URLs will now be broken. As you can see below, the new URLs are much more sensible.

Note that there has been no change to URLs or file paths when use_directory_urls is set to True (the default), except that MkDocs more consistently includes an ending slash on all internally generated URLs.

The pages configuration setting has been renamed to nav¶

The pages configuration setting is deprecated and will issue a warning if set in the configuration file. The setting has been renamed nav. To update your configuration, simply rename the setting to nav. In other words, if your configuration looked like this:

pages:
    - Home: index.md
    - User Guide: user-guide.md

Simply edit the configuration as follows:

nav:
    - Home: index.md
    - User Guide: user-guide.md

In the current release, any configuration which includes a pages setting, but no nav setting, the pages configuration will be copied to nav and a warning will be issued. However, in a future release, that may no longer happen. If both pages and nav are defined, the pages setting will be ignored.

Template variables and base_url¶

In previous versions of MkDocs some URLs expected the base_url template variable to be prepended to the URL and others did not. That inconsistency has been removed in that no URLs are modified before being added to the template context.

For example, a theme template might have previously included a link to the site_name as:

<a href="{{ nav.homepage.url }}">{{ config.site_name }}</a>

And MkDocs would magically return a URL for the homepage which was relative to the current page. That "magic" has been removed and the url template filter should be used:

<a href="{{ nav.homepage.url|url }}">{{ config.site_name }}</a>

This change applies to any navigation items and pages, as well as the page.next_page and page.previous_page attributes. For the time being, the extra_javascript and extra_css variables continue to work as previously (without the url template filter), but they have been deprecated and the corresponding configuration values (config.extra_javascript and config.extra_css respectively) should be used with the filter instead.

{% for path in config['extra_css'] %}
    <link href="{{ path|url }}" rel="stylesheet">
{% endfor %}

Note that navigation can now include links to external sites. Obviously, the base_url should not be prepended to these items. However, the url template filter is smart enough to recognize the URL is absolute and does not alter it. Therefore, all navigation items can be passed to the filter and only those that need to will be altered.

{% for nav_item in nav %}
    <a href="{{ nav_item.url|url }}">{{ nav_item.title }}</a>
{% endfor %}

Path Based Settings are Relative to Configuration File (#543)¶

Previously any relative paths in the various configuration options were resolved relative to the current working directory. They are now resolved relative to the configuration file. As the documentation has always encouraged running the various MkDocs commands from the directory that contains the configuration file (project root), this change will not affect most users. However, it will make it much easier to implement automated builds or otherwise run commands from a location other than the project root.

Simply use the -f/--config-file option and point it at the configuration file:

mkdocs build --config-file /path/to/my/config/file.yml

As previously, if no file is specified, MkDocs looks for a file named mkdocs.yml in the current working directory.

Added support for YAML Meta-Data (#1542)¶

Previously, MkDocs only supported MultiMarkdown style meta-data, which does not recognize different data types and is rather limited. MkDocs now also supports YAML style meta-data in Markdown documents. MkDocs relies on the the presence or absence of the deliminators (--- or ...) to determine whether YAML style meta-data or MultiMarkdown style meta-data is being used.

Previously MkDocs would recognize MultiMarkdown style meta-data between the deliminators. Now, if the deliminators are detected, but the content between the deliminators is not valid YAML meta-data, MkDocs does not attempt to parse the content as MultiMarkdown style meta-data. Therefore, MultiMarkdown's style meta-data must not include the deliminators. See the MultiMarkdown style meta-data documentation for details.

Prior to version 0.17, MkDocs returned all meta-data values as a list of strings (even a single line would return a list of one string). In version 0.17, that behavior was changed to return each value as a single string (multiple lines were joined), which some users found limiting (see #1471). That behavior continues for MultiMarkdown style meta-data in the current version. However, YAML style meta-data supports the full range of "safe" YAML data types. Therefore, it is recommended that any complex meta-data make use of the YAML style (see the YAML style meta-data documentation for details). In fact, a future version of MkDocs may deprecate support for MultiMarkdown style meta-data.

Refactor Search Plugin¶

The search plugin has been completely refactored to include support for the following features:

• Use a web worker in the browser with a fallback (#1396).
• Optionally pre-build search index locally (#859 & #1061).
• Upgrade to lunr.js 2.x (#1319).
• Support search in languages other than English (#826).
• Allow the user to define the word separators (#867).
• Only run searches for queries of length > 2 (#1127).
• Remove dependency on require.js (#1218).
• Compress the search index (#1128).

Users can review the configuration options available and theme authors should review how search and themes interact.

theme_dir Configuration Option fully Deprecated¶

As of version 0.17, the custom_dir option replaced the deprecated theme_dir option. If users had set the theme_dir option, MkDocs version 0.17 copied the value to the theme.custom_dir option and a warning was issued. As of version 1.0, the value is no longer copied and an error is raised.

Other Changes and Additions to Version 1.0¶

• Keyboard shortcuts changed to not conflict with commonly used accessibility shortcuts (#1502.)
• User friendly YAML parse errors (#1543).
• Officially support Python 3.7.
• A missing theme configuration file now raises an error.
• Empty extra_css and extra_javascript settings no longer raise a warning.
• Add highlight.js configuration settings to built-in themes (#1284).
• Close search modal when result is selected (#1527).
• Add a level attribute to AnchorLinks (#1272).
• Add MkDocs version check to gh-deploy script (#640).
• Improve Markdown extension error messages. (#782).
• Drop official support for Python 3.3 and set tornado>=5.0 (#1427).
• Add support for GitLab edit links (#1435).
• Link to GitHub issues from release notes (#644).
• Expand {sha} and {version} in gh-deploy commit message (#1410).
• Compress sitemap.xml (#1130).
• Defer loading JS scripts (#1380).
• Add a title attribute to the search input (#1379).
• Update RespondJS to latest version (#1398).
• Always load Google Analytics over HTTPS (#1397).
• Improve scrolling frame rate (#1394).
• Provide more version info. (#1393).
• Refactor writing-your-docs.md (#1392).
• Workaround Safari bug when zooming to < 100% (#1389).
• Remove addition of clicky class to body and animations. (#1387).
• Prevent search plugin from re-injecting extra_javascript files (#1388).
• Refactor copy_media_files util function for more flexibility (#1370).
• Remove PyPI Deployment Docs (#1360).
• Update links to Python-Markdown library (#1360).
• Document how to generate manpages for MkDocs commands (#686).

Version 0.17.5 (2018-07-06)¶

• Bugfix: Fix Python 3.7 and PEP 479 incompatibility (#1518).

Version 0.17.4 (2018-06-08)¶

• Bugfix: Add multi-level nesting support to sitemap.xml (#1482).

Version 0.17.3 (2018-03-07)¶

• Bugfix: Set dependency tornado>=4.1,<5.0 due to changes in 5.0 (#1428).

Version 0.17.2 (2017-11-15)¶

• Bugfix: Correct extra_* config setting regressions (#1335 & #1336).

Version 0.17.1 (2017-10-30)¶

• Bugfix: Support repo_url with missing ending slash. (#1321).
• Bugfix: Add length support to mkdocs.toc.TableOfContext (#1325).
• Bugfix: Add some theme specific settings to the search plugin for third party themes (#1316).
• Bugfix: Override site_url with dev_addr on local server (#1317).

Version 0.17.0 (2017-10-19)¶

Major Additions to Version 0.17.0¶

Plugin API. (#206)¶

A new Plugin API has been added to MkDocs which allows users to define their own custom behaviors. See the included documentation for a full explanation of the API.

The previously built-in search functionality has been removed and wrapped in a plugin (named "search") with no changes in behavior. When MkDocs builds, the search index is now written to search/search_index.json instead of mkdocs/search_index.json. If no plugins setting is defined in the config, then the search plugin will be included by default. See the configuration documentation for information on overriding the default.

Theme Customization. (#1164)¶

Support had been added to provide theme specific customizations. Theme authors can define default options as documented in Theme Configuration. A theme can now inherit from another theme, define various static templates to be rendered, and define arbitrary default variables to control behavior in the templates. The theme configuration is defined in a configuration file named mkdocs_theme.yml which should be placed at the root of your template files. A warning will be raised if no configuration file is found and an error will be raised in a future release.

Users can override those defaults under the theme configuration option of their mkdocs.yml configuration file, which now accepts nested options. One such nested option is the custom_dir option, which replaces the now deprecated theme_dir option. If users had previously set the theme_dir option, a warning will be issued, with an error expected in a future release.

If a configuration previously defined a theme_dir like this:

theme: mkdocs
theme_dir: custom

Then the configuration should be adjusted as follows:

theme:
    name: mkdocs
    custom_dir: custom

See the theme configuration option documentation for details.

Previously deprecated Template variables removed. (#1168)¶

Page Template¶

The primary entry point for page templates has been changed from base.html to main.html. This allows base.html to continue to exist while allowing users to override main.html and extend base.html. For version 0.16, base.html continued to work if no main.html template existed, but it raised a deprecation warning. In version 1.0, a build will fail if no main.html template exists.

Context Variables¶

Page specific variable names in the template context have been refactored as defined in Custom Themes. The old variable names issued a warning in version 0.16, but have been removed in version 1.0.

Any of the following old page variables should be updated to the new ones in user created and third-party templates:

Additionally, a number of global variables have been altered and/or removed and user created and third-party templates should be updated as outlined below:

Auto-Populated extra_css and extra_javascript Fully Deprecated. (#986)¶

In previous versions of MkDocs, if the extra_css or extra_javascript config settings were empty, MkDocs would scan the docs_dir and auto-populate each setting with all of the CSS and JavaScript files found. On version 0.16 this behavior was deprecated and a warning was issued. In 0.17 any unlisted CSS and JavaScript files will not be included in the HTML templates, however, a warning will be issued. In other words, they will still be copied to the site-dir, but they will not have any effect on the theme if they are not explicitly listed.

All CSS and JavaScript files in the docs_dir should be explicitly listed in the extra_css or extra_javascript config settings going forward.

Other Changes and Additions to Version 0.17.0¶

• Add "edit Link" support to MkDocs theme (#1129)
• Open files with utf-8-sig to account for BOM (#1186)
• Symbolic links are now followed consistently (#1134)
• Support for keyboard navigation shortcuts added to included themes (#1095)
• Some refactoring and improvements to config_options (#1296)
• Officially added support for Python 3.6 (#1296)
• 404 Error page added to readthedocs theme (#1296))
• Internal refactor of Markdown processing (#713)
• Removed special error message for mkdocs-bootstrap and mkdocs-bootswatch themes (#1168)
• The legacy pages config is no longer supported (#1168)
• The deprecated json command has been removed (#481)
• Support for Python 2.6 has been dropped (#165)
• File permissions are no longer copied during build (#1292)
• Support query and fragment strings in edit_uri (#1224 & #1273)

Version 0.16.3 (2017-04-04)¶

• Fix error raised by autoscrolling in the readthedocs theme (#1177)
• Fix a few documentation typos (#1181 & #1185)
• Fix a regression to livereload server introduced in 0.16.2 (#1174)

Version 0.16.2 (2017-03-13)¶

• System root (/) is not a valid path for site_dir or docs_dir (#1161)
• Refactor readthedocs theme navigation (#1155 & #1156)
• Add support to dev server to serve custom error pages (#1040)
• Ensure nav.homepage.url is not blank on error pages (#1131)
• Increase livereload dependency to 2.5.1 (#1106)

Version 0.16.1 (2016-12-22)¶

• Ensure scrollspy behavior does not affect nav bar (#1094)
• Only "load" a theme when it is explicitly requested by the user (#1105)

Version 0.16 (2016-11-04)¶

Major Additions to Version 0.16.0¶

Template variables refactored. (#874)¶

Page Context¶

Page specific variable names in the template context have been refactored as defined in Custom Themes. The old variable names will issue a warning but continue to work for version 0.16, but may be removed in a future version.

Any of the following old page variables should be updated to the new ones in user created and third-party templates:

Global Context¶

Additionally, a number of global variables have been altered and/or deprecated and user created and third-party templates should be updated as outlined below:

Previously, the global variable include_nav was altered programmatically based on the number of pages in the nav. The variable will issue a warning but continue to work for version 0.16, but may be removed in a future version. Use {% if nav|length>1 %} instead.

Previously, the global variable include_next_prev was altered programmatically based on the number of pages in the nav. The variable will issue a warning but continue to work for version 0.16, but may be removed in a future version. Use {% if page.next_page or page.previous_page %} instead.

Previously the global variable page_description was altered programmatically based on whether the current page was the homepage. Now it simply maps to config['site_description']. Use {% if page.is_homepage %} in the template to conditionally change the description.

The global variable homepage_url maps directly to nav.homepage.url and is being deprecated. The variable will issue a warning but continue to work for version 0.16, but may be removed in a future version. Use nav.homepage.url instead.

The global variable favicon maps to the configuration setting site_favicon. Both the template variable and the configuration setting are being deprecated and will issue a warning but continue to work for version 0.16, and may be removed in a future version. Use {{ base_url }}/img/favicon.ico in your template instead. Users can simply save a copy of their custom favicon icon to img/favicon.ico in either their docs_dir or theme_dir.

A number of variables map directly to similarly named variables in the config. Those variables are being deprecated and will issue a warning but continue to work for version 0.16, but may be removed in a future version. Use config.var_name instead, where var_name is the name of one of the configuration variables.

Below is a summary of all of the changes made to the global context:

Increased Template Customization. (#607)¶

The built-in themes have been updated by having each of their many parts wrapped in template blocks which allow each individual block to be easily overridden using the theme_dir config setting. Without any new settings, you can use a different analytics service, replace the default search function, or alter the behavior of the navigation, among other things. See the relevant documentation for more details.

To enable this feature, the primary entry point for page templates has been changed from base.html to main.html. This allows base.html to continue to exist while allowing users to override main.html and extend base.html. For version 0.16, base.html will continue to work if no main.html template exists, but it is deprecated and will raise a warning. In version 1.0, a build will fail if no main.html template exists. Any custom and third party templates should be updated accordingly.

The easiest way for a third party theme to be updated would be to simply add a main.html file which only contains the following line:

{% extends "base.html" %}

That way, the theme contains the main.html entry point, and also supports overriding blocks in the same manner as the built-in themes. Third party themes are encouraged to wrap the various pieces of their templates in blocks in order to support such customization.

Auto-Populated extra_css and extra_javascript Deprecated. (#986)¶

In previous versions of MkDocs, if the extra_css or extra_javascript config settings were empty, MkDocs would scan the docs_dir and auto-populate each setting with all of the CSS and JavaScript files found. This behavior is deprecated and a warning will be issued. In the next release, the auto-populate feature will stop working and any unlisted CSS and JavaScript files will not be included in the HTML templates. In other words, they will still be copied to the site-dir, but they will not have any effect on the theme if they are not explicitly listed.

All CSS and JavaScript files in the docs_dir should be explicitly listed in the extra_css or extra_javascript config settings going forward.

Support for dirty builds. (#990)¶

For large sites the build time required to create the pages can become problematic, thus a "dirty" build mode was created. This mode simply compares the modified time of the generated HTML and source markdown. If the markdown has changed since the HTML then the page is re-constructed. Otherwise, the page remains as is. This mode may be invoked in both the mkdocs serve and mkdocs build commands:

mkdocs serve --dirtyreload

mkdocs build --dirty

It is important to note that this method for building the pages is for development of content only, since the navigation and other links do not get updated on other pages.

Stricter Directory Validation¶

Previously, a warning was issued if the site_dir was a child directory of the docs_dir. This now raises an error. Additionally, an error is now raised if the docs_dir is set to the directory which contains your config file rather than a child directory. You will need to rearrange you directory structure to better conform with the documented layout.

Other Changes and Additions to Version 0.16.0¶

• Bugfix: Support gh-deploy command on Windows with Python 3 (#722)
• Bugfix: Include .woff2 font files in Python package build (#894)
• Various updates and improvements to Documentation Home Page/Tutorial (#870)
• Bugfix: Support livereload for config file changes (#735)
• Bugfix: Non-media template files are no longer copied with media files (#807)
• Add a flag (-e/--theme-dir) to specify theme directory with the commands mkdocs build and mkdocs serve (#832)
• Fixed issues with Unicode file names under Windows and Python 2. (#833)
• Improved the styling of in-line code in the MkDocs theme. (#718)
• Bugfix: convert variables to JSON when being passed to JavaScript (#850)
• Updated the ReadTheDocs theme to match the upstream font sizes and colors more closely. (#857)
• Fixes an issue with permalink markers showing when the mouse was far above them (#843)
• Bugfix: Handle periods in directory name when automatically creating the pages config. (#728)
• Update searching to Lunr 0.7, which comes with some performance enhancements for larger documents (#859)
• Bugfix: Support SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable for "reproducible" builds (#938)
• Follow links when copying media files (#869).
• Change "Edit on..." links to point directly to the file in the source repository, rather than to the root of the repository (#975), configurable via the new edit_uri setting.
• Bugfix: Don't override config value for strict mode if not specified on CLI (#738).
• Add a --force flag to the gh-deploy command to force the push to the repository (#973).
• Improve alignment for current selected menu item in readthedocs theme (#888).
• http://user.github.io/repo => https://user.github.io/repo/ (#1029).
• Improve installation instructions (#1028).
• Account for wide tables and consistently wrap inline code spans (#834).
• Bugfix: Use absolute URLs in nav & media links from error templates (#77).

Version 0.15.3 (2016-02-18)¶

• Improve the error message the given theme can't be found.
• Fix an issue with relative symlinks (#639)

Version 0.15.2 (2016-02-08)¶

• Fix an incorrect warning that states external themes will be removed from MkDocs.

Version 0.15.1 (2016-01-30)¶

• Lower the minimum supported Click version to 3.3 for package maintainers. (#763)

Version 0.15.0 (2016-01-21)¶

Major Additions to Version 0.15.0¶

Add support for installable themes¶

MkDocs now supports themes that are distributed via Python packages. With this addition, the Bootstrap and Bootswatch themes have been moved to external git repositories and python packages. See their individual documentation for more details about these specific themes.

• MkDocs Bootstrap
• MkDocs Bootswatch

They will be included with MkDocs by default until a future release. After that they will be installable with pip: pip install mkdocs-bootstrap and pip install mkdocs-bootswatch

See the documentation for Customizing Your Theme for more information about using and customizing themes and Custom themes for creating and distributing new themes

Other Changes and Additions to Version 0.15.0¶

• Fix issues when using absolute links to Markdown files. (#628)
• Deprecate support of Python 2.6, pending removal in 1.0.0. (#165)
• Add official support for Python version 3.5.
• Add support for site_description and site_author to the ReadTheDocs theme. (#631)
• Update FontAwesome to 4.5.0. (#789)
• Increase IE support with X-UA-Compatible. (#785)
• Added support for Python's -m flag. (#706)
• Bugfix: Ensure consistent ordering of auto-populated pages. (#638)
• Bugfix: Scroll the tables of contents on the MkDocs theme if it is too long for the page. (#204)
• Bugfix: Add all ancestors to the page attribute ancestors rather than just the initial one. (#693)
• Bugfix: Include HTML in the build output again. (#691)
• Bugfix: Provide filename to Read the Docs. (#721 and RTD#1480)
• Bugfix: Silence Click's unicode_literals warning. (#708)

Version 0.14.0 (2015-06-09)¶

• Improve Unicode handling by ensuring that all config strings are loaded as Unicode. (#592)
• Remove dependency on the six library. (#583)
• Remove dependency on the ghp-import library. (#547)
• Add --quiet and --verbose options to all sub-commands. (#579)
• Add short options (-a) to most command line options. (#579)
• Add copyright footer for readthedocs theme. (#568)
• If the requested port in mkdocs serve is already in use, don't show the user a full stack trace. (#596)
• Bugfix: Fix a JavaScript encoding problem when searching with spaces. (#586)
• Bugfix: gh-deploy now works if the mkdocs.yml is not in the git repo root. (#578)
• Bugfix: Handle (pass-through instead of dropping) HTML entities while parsing TOC. (#612)
• Bugfix: Default extra_templates to an empty list, don't automatically discover them. (#616)

Version 0.13.3 (2015-06-02)¶

• Bugfix: Reduce validation error to a warning if the site_dir is within the docs_dir as this shouldn't cause any problems with building but will inconvenience users building multiple times. (#580)

Version 0.13.2 (2015-05-30)¶

• Bugfix: Ensure all errors and warnings are logged before exiting. (#536)
• Bugfix: Fix compatibility issues with ReadTheDocs. (#554)

Version 0.13.1 (2015-05-27)¶

• Bugfix: Fix a problem with minimal configurations which only contain a list of paths in the pages config. (#562)

Version 0.13.0 (2015-05-26)¶

Deprecations to Version 0.13.0¶

Deprecate the JSON command¶

In this release the mkdocs json command has been marked as deprecated and when used a deprecation warning will be shown. It will be removed in a future release of MkDocs, version 1.0 at the latest. The mkdocs json command provided a convenient way for users to output the documentation contents as JSON files but with the additions of search to MkDocs this functionality is duplicated.

A new index with all the contents from a MkDocs build is created in the site_dir, so with the default value for the site_dir It can be found in site/mkdocs/search_index.json.

This new file is created on every MkDocs build (with mkdocs build) and no configuration is needed to enable it.

Change the pages configuration¶

Provide a new way to define pages, and specifically nested pages, in the mkdocs.yml file and deprecate the existing approach, support will be removed with MkDocs 1.0.

Warn users about the removal of builtin themes¶

All themes other than mkdocs and readthedocs will be moved into external packages in a future release of MkDocs. This will enable them to be more easily supported and updates outside MkDocs releases.

Major Additions to Version 0.13.0¶

Search¶

Support for search has now been added to MkDocs. This is based on the JavaScript library lunr.js. It has been added to both the mkdocs and readthedocs themes. See the custom theme documentation on supporting search for adding it to your own themes.

New Command Line Interface¶

The command line interface for MkDocs has been re-written with the Python library Click. This means that MkDocs now has an easier to use interface with better help output.

This change is partially backwards incompatible as while undocumented it was possible to pass any configuration option to the different commands. Now only a small subset of the configuration options can be passed to the commands. To see in full commands and available arguments use mkdocs --help and mkdocs build --help to have them displayed.

Support Extra HTML and XML files¶

Like the extra_javascript and extra_css configuration options, a new option named extra_templates has been added. This will automatically be populated with any .html or .xml files in the project docs directory.

Users can place static HTML and XML files and they will be copied over, or they can also use Jinja2 syntax and take advantage of the global variables.

By default MkDocs will use this approach to create a sitemap for the documentation.

Other Changes and Additions to Version 0.13.0¶

• Add support for Markdown extension configuration options. (#435)
• MkDocs now ships Python wheels. (#486)
• Only include the build date and MkDocs version on the homepage. (#490)
• Generate sitemaps for documentation builds. (#436)
• Add a clearer way to define nested pages in the configuration. (#482)
• Add an extra config option for passing arbitrary variables to the template. (#510)
• Add --no-livereload to mkdocs serve for a simpler development server. (#511)
• Add copyright display support to all themes (#549)
• Add support for custom commit messages in a mkdocs gh-deploy (#516)
• Bugfix: Fix linking to media within the same directory as a markdown file called index.md (#535)
• Bugfix: Fix errors with Unicode filenames (#542).

Version 0.12.2 (2015-04-22)¶

• Bugfix: Fix a regression where there would be an error if some child titles were missing but others were provided in the pages config. (#464)

Version 0.12.1 (2015-04-14)¶

• Bugfix: Fixed a CSS bug in the table of contents on some browsers where the bottom item was not clickable.

Version 0.12.0 (2015-04-14)¶

• Display the current MkDocs version in the CLI output. (#258)
• Check for CNAME file when using gh-deploy. (#285)
• Add the homepage back to the navigation on all themes. (#271)
• Add a strict more for local link checking. (#279)
• Add Google analytics support to all themes. (#333)
• Add build date and MkDocs version to the ReadTheDocs and MkDocs theme outputs. (#382)
• Standardize highlighting across all themes and add missing languages. (#387)
• Add a verbose flag. (-v) to show more details about what the build. (#147)
• Add the option to specify a remote branch when deploying to GitHub. This enables deploying to GitHub pages on personal and repo sites. (#354)
• Add favicon support to the ReadTheDocs theme HTML. (#422)
• Automatically refresh the browser when files are edited. (#163)
• Bugfix: Never re-write URLs in code blocks. (#240)
• Bugfix: Don't copy dotfiles when copying media from the docs_dir. (#254)
• Bugfix: Fix the rendering of tables in the ReadTheDocs theme. (#106)
• Bugfix: Add padding to the bottom of all bootstrap themes. (#255)
• Bugfix: Fix issues with nested Markdown pages and the automatic pages configuration. (#276)
• Bugfix: Fix a URL parsing error with GitHub enterprise. (#284)
• Bugfix: Don't error if the mkdocs.yml is completely empty. (#288)
• Bugfix: Fix a number of problems with relative URLs and Markdown files. (#292)
• Bugfix: Don't stop the build if a page can't be found, continue with other pages. (#150)
• Bugfix: Remove the site_name from the page title, this needs to be added manually. (#299)
• Bugfix: Fix an issue with table of contents cutting off Markdown. (#294)
• Bugfix: Fix hostname for BitBucket. (#339)
• Bugfix: Ensure all links end with a slash. (#344)
• Bugfix: Fix repo links in the readthedocs theme. (#365)
• Bugfix: Include jQuery locally to avoid problems using MkDocs offline. (#143)
• Bugfix: Don't allow the docs_dir to be in the site_dir or vice versa. (#384)
• Bugfix: Remove inline CSS in the ReadTheDocs theme. (#393)
• Bugfix: Fix problems with the child titles due to the order the pages config was processed. (#395)
• Bugfix: Don't error during live reload when the theme doesn't exist. (#373)
• Bugfix: Fix problems with the Meta extension when it may not exist. (#398)
• Bugfix: Wrap long inline code otherwise they will run off the screen. (#313)
• Bugfix: Remove HTML parsing regular expressions and parse with HTMLParser to fix problems with titles containing code. (#367)
• Bugfix: Fix an issue with the scroll to anchor causing the title to be hidden under the navigation. (#7)
• Bugfix: Add nicer CSS classes to the HTML tables in bootswatch themes. (#295)
• Bugfix: Fix an error when passing in a specific config file with mkdocs serve. (#341)
• Bugfix: Don't overwrite index.md files with the mkdocs new command. (#412)
• Bugfix: Remove bold and italic from code in the ReadTheDocs theme. (#411)
• Bugfix: Display images inline in the MkDocs theme. (#415)
• Bugfix: Fix problems with no-highlight in the ReadTheDocs theme. (#319)
• Bugfix: Don't delete hidden files when using mkdocs build --clean. (#346)
• Bugfix: Don't block newer versions of Python-markdown on Python >= 2.7. (#376)
• Bugfix: Fix encoding issues when opening files across platforms. (#428)

Version 0.11.1 (2014-11-20)¶

• Bugfix: Fix a CSS wrapping issue with code highlighting in the ReadTheDocs theme. (#233)

Version 0.11.0 (2014-11-18)¶

• Render 404.html files if they exist for the current theme. (#194)
• Bugfix: Fix long nav bars, table rendering and code highlighting in MkDocs and ReadTheDocs themes. (#225)
• Bugfix: Fix an issue with the google_analytics code. (#219)
• Bugfix: Remove __pycache__ from the package tar. (#196)
• Bugfix: Fix markdown links that go to an anchor on the current page. (#197)
• Bugfix: Don't add prettyprint well CSS classes to all HTML, only add it in the MkDocs theme. (#183)
• Bugfix: Display section titles in the ReadTheDocs theme. (#175)
• Bugfix: Use the polling observer in watchdog so rebuilding works on filesystems without inotify. (#184)
• Bugfix: Improve error output for common configuration related errors. (#176)

Version 0.10.0 (2014-10-29)¶

• Added support for Python 3.3 and 3.4. (#103)
• Configurable Python-Markdown extensions with the config setting markdown_extensions. (#74)
• Added mkdocs json command to output your rendered documentation as json files. (#128)
• Added --clean switch to build, json and gh-deploy commands to remove stale files from the output directory. (#157)
• Support multiple theme directories to allow replacement of individual templates rather than copying the full theme. (#129)
• Bugfix: Fix <ul> rendering in readthedocs theme. (#171)
• Bugfix: Improve the readthedocs theme on smaller displays. (#168)
• Bugfix: Relaxed required python package versions to avoid clashes. (#104)
• Bugfix: Fix issue rendering the table of contents with some configs. (#146)
• Bugfix: Fix path for embedded images in sub pages. (#138)
• Bugfix: Fix use_directory_urls config behavior. (#63)
• Bugfix: Support extra_javascript and extra_css in all themes. (#90)
• Bugfix: Fix path-handling under Windows. (#121)
• Bugfix: Fix the menu generation in the readthedocs theme. (#110)
• Bugfix: Fix the mkdocs command creation under Windows. (#122)
• Bugfix: Correctly handle external extra_javascript and extra_css. (#92)
• Bugfix: Fixed favicon support. (#87)