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Versioning

Zensical allows to deploy and connect multiple versions of your project documentation on GitHub Pages by integrating with our fork of mike, a tool that was originally designed for MkDocs which we adapted for Zensical – a bridge solution until we introduce native versioning support.

Installation

We provide a fork of mike that you can install with pip:

pip install git+https://github.com/squidfunk/mike.git

This will make the mike executable available in your environment.

This package is not published on PyPI

Note that installation requires git. Since we consider this a temporary solution, we do not plan to publish this package on PyPI, so you need to install it directly from GitHub.

Configuration

Versioning

mike makes it easy to deploy multiple versions of your project documentation. The version selector can be enabled by setting the provider option to mike:

[project.extra.version]
provider = "mike"

extra:
  version:
    provider: mike

Version warning

If you're using versioning, you might want to display a warning when the user visits any other version than the latest version. Using theme extension, you can override the outdated block:

{% extends "base.html" %}

{% block outdated %}
  You're not viewing the latest version.
  <a href="{{ '../' ~ base_url }}"> <!-- (1)! -->
    <strong>Click here to go to latest.</strong>
  </a>
{% endblock %}
  1. Given this value for the href attribute, the link will always redirect to the root of your site, which will then redirect to the latest version. This ensures that older versions of your site do not depend on a specific alias, e.g. latest, to allow for changing the alias later on without breaking earlier versions.

This will render a version warning above the header.

The default version is identified by the latest alias. If you wish to set another alias as the latest version, e.g. stable, add the following lines to your configuration:

[project.extra.version]
default = "stable" # (1)!

  1. You can also define multiple aliases as the default version, e.g. stable and development.

    [project.extra.version]
default = ["stable", "development"]

    Now every version that has the stable and development aliases will not display the version warning.

extra:
  version:
    default: stable # (1)!

  1. You can also define multiple aliases as the default version, e.g. stable and development.

    extra:
  version:
    default:
      - stable
      - development

    Now every version that has the stable and development aliases will not display the version warning.

Make sure one alias matches the default version, as this is where users are redirected to.

Version alias

If you're using aliases for versioning, and want to show the version alias besides the version number, you can enable this feature by setting the alias option to true:

[project.extra.version]
alias = true

extra:
  version:
    alias: true

Usage

While this section outlines the basic workflow for publishing new versions, it's best to check out mike's documentation to make yourself familiar with its mechanics.

Publishing a new version

If you want to publish a new version of your project documentation, choose a version identifier and update the alias set as the default version with:

mike deploy --push --update-aliases 0.1 latest

Note that every version will be deployed as a subdirectory of your site_url, which you should set explicitly. For example, if your configuration contains:

[project]
site_url = "https://docs.example.com/"  # Trailing slash is recommended

site_url: 'https://docs.example.com/'  # Trailing slash is recommended

the documentation will be published to URLs such as:

  • docs.example.com/0.1/
  • docs.example.com/0.2/
  • ...

Setting a default version

When starting with mike, a good idea is to set an alias as a default version, e.g. latest, and when publishing a new version, always update the alias to point to the latest version:

mike set-default --push latest

When publishing a new version, mike will create a redirect in the root of your project documentation to the version associated with the alias:

docs.example.com docs.example.com/0.1