Mkdocs: Control Displayed Versions with Mike

Summary:

An update of the previously deployed MkDocs with the Mike plugin setup to keep only the three latest versions in the UI. Let's dive into the details!

Introduction

This is part 2 of the MkDocs with Mike integration series. In part 1, we covered how to enable and deploy the Mike plugin in MkDocs. In today's post, we cover how to update the GitHub workflows to keep only the three latest versions while displaying an Archive page that will serve users as a way to explore older documentation versions.

GitHub Resources

The showcase repository is available here.

Prerequisites

1. Go through part 1 of the series
2. Basic knowledge and understanding of MkDocs
3. Basic understanding of GitHub workflows

GitHub Workflows - Update

After looking into the existing GitHub workflows, I decided to keep the test.yml workflow the way it is while updating the prod.yml to implement the logic of updating the already deployed Mike versions.

note

As a reminder, the test.yml is triggered when the main branch of the documentation is updated. The current and future releases are handled by the prod.yml file.

Prod Workflow

name: CI Build Prod Docu
on:
  release:
    types: [published]
permissions:
  contents: write
jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - uses: actions/setup-python@v5
        with:
          python-version: 3.x
      - name: Install Dependencies
        run: |
          pip install mkdocs-material
          pip install mike
      - name: Setup Docs Deploy
        run: |
          git config --global user.name "Example Docu Deploy"
          git config --global user.email "docs.deploy@eleni.dev"
      - name: Build Docs Website
        run: mike deploy --push --update-aliases ${{ github.event.release.tag_name }} latest
      - name: Hide Old Releases
        run: |
          VISIBLE_RELEASES=2
          # Include only versions starting with `v`.
          # Sort the versions from oldest to latest
          all_releases=$(mike list --json | \
                                 jq -r '.[] | select(.properties.hidden | not) | .version' | \
                                 grep -E '^v?[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+(\-.*)?$' | \
                                 sort -V)
          # Add the Mike versions into an array
          releases_array=($all_releases)
          num_releases=${#releases_array[@]}

          # Check if more than 2 releases are available
          if (( num_releases > VISIBLE_RELEASES )); then
            hide=$((num_releases - VISIBLE_RELEASES))
            echo "We have to hide $hide versions"
            
            # Take the oldest applicable releases and hide them
            for (( i=0; i<hide; i++ )); do
              hide_version=${releases_array[i]}
              echo "Hiding release version: $hide_version"
              mike props --set hidden=true "$hide_version" --push 
            done
          else
            echo "No release versions to hide. Exit"
          fi

Looking at the YAML definition, what is important is the newly added Hide Old Releases section. How does it work? We use the mike list command to collect the available versions as JSON, we sort them out using the -V argument (natural sort of (version) numbers within text), we go through the list using a for loop, and finally we get the top item from the list and hide it. Then we push the changes. The versions are sorted from oldest to latest.

note

The Mike official documentation is a great source of information. There might be a better way of doing something similar. Feel free to share your ideas! 😊

tip

Even if we hide the old versions, they are still available in the gh-pages branch. Continue to the Archive section and have a look at how to create this page.

Archive

Even if the old versions are hidden, they are still accessible. This can be achieved by creating a new page called archive.md.

The file could get created under blog/ and then defined in the mkdocs.yml file.

archive.md

Create the archive.md file and include the URLs of any older versions. For example, https://egrosdou01.github.io/mkdocs-versioning-example/v0.0.1/.

## Documentation Archive

### Previous Versions
- [Version 0.0.1](https://egrosdou01.github.io/mkdocs-versioning-example/v0.0.1/)
- [Version 0.0.2](https://egrosdou01.github.io/mkdocs-versioning-example/v0.0.2/)

mkdocs.yml

Include the archive.md in the nav section of the mkdocs.yml file.

nav:
- Home: 'index.md'
...
- Archive: 'archive.md'

Following the same flow as described in part 1 of the series, every time a new release is available, we update the documentation with the latest release and remove the older version from the top of the list.

Conclusion

With a few tweaks to the GitHub workflow, we can control the number of displayed versions in the documentation UI! Happy coding!

What's Next?

We will optimise the GitHub workflow to update the archive.md automatically instead of a manual addition.

Resources

• MkDocs and Mike Example Repo

✉️ Contact

If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch! You can use the Discussions option found here or reach out to me on any of the social media platforms provided. 😊 We look forward to hearing from you!