ExDocMkdocs

This library implements a formatter for ex_doc that generates an MkDocs static site from the documentation.

Installation

The library is not available in Hex but can be pulled from Github:

def deps do
  [
    {:ex_doc_mkdocs, github: "lud-wj/ex_doc_mkdocs", only: [:dev], runtime: false},
  ]
end

Configuration

First, MkDocs needs some configuration to generate the site correctly:

• :site_name - Defines the main title of the generated site.
• :repo_url - Links the documentation to the source code repository.

The easiest way to configure this is to add the following function in your mix.exs file:

defp mkdocs do
  [
    site_name: "Mkdocs formatter for ex_doc",
    repo_url: "https://github.com/lud-wj/ex_doc_mkdocs/"
  ]
end

And then export this data from the project function:

def project do
  [
    # ...
    mkdocs: mkdocs(),
    # ...
  ]
end

Generate the docs

To use this formatter, run mix docs --formatter mkdocs. The generated site will be available in the doc directory by default. It will contain:

• mkdocs.yml - The configuration file for MkDocs.
• markdown - The generated Markdown files.

Using MkDocs locally

To preview the documentation you may use MkDocs to serve the markdown files.

First, install MkDocs, for instance with Python Pip:

pip install mkdocs

Then, run it:

(cd doc && mkdocs serve)

Note that mkdocs serve executes in watch mode by default, so the preview will be reloaded whenever you call mix docs --formatter mkdocs again (which can be trigerred automatically from your changes in the docs by fswatch for instance).

Generating the static site

To build the documentation, you can generate the static site with MkDocs:

(cd doc && mkdocs build)

Publishing the docs to Backstage from Github Actions

To push the documentation to Backstage, the following action can be used.

Note that we do not describe here how to initialize the Backstage workspace or the link to S3.

name: Publish docs to S3

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]

jobs:
  publish-ex_doc-site:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    env:
      BACKSTAGE_S3_BUCKET: "my-bucket"
      AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
      AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
      AWS_DEFAULT_REGION: eu-west-1 # tweak at your convenience
      AWS_REGION: eu-west-1         # tweak at your convenience
      ENTITY_NAMESPACE: "default"
      ENTITY_KIND: "Component"
      ENTITY_NAME: "my-library"

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - uses: actions/setup-node@v2

      - uses: erlef/setup-beam@v1
        with:
          otp-version: '25'
          elixir-version: '1.14.4'

      - name: Get mix deps
        run: mix deps.get --only dev

      - name: Generate mkdocs source
        run: mix docs --formatter mkdocs

      - name: Install techdocs-cli
        run: sudo npm install -g @techdocs/cli

      - name: Install mkdocs and mkdocs plugins
        run: python -m pip install mkdocs-techdocs-core

      - name: Generate techdocs from mkdocs sources
        working-directory: doc
        run: techdocs-cli generate --no-docker --verbose

      - name: Publish docs site
        working-directory: doc
        run: techdocs-cli publish --publisher-type awsS3 --storage-name $BACKSTAGE_S3_BUCKET --entity $ENTITY_NAMESPACE/$ENTITY_KIND/$ENTITY_NAME