docs-builder.

You've reached the home of the latest incarnation of the documentation tooling.

This repository is host to:

• docs-builder command line tool to generate single doc-sets (13mb native code, no dependencies)
• docs-assembler command line tool to assemble all the doc sets. (IN PROGRESS)
• elastic/docs-builder@main Github Action to build and validate a repositories documentation

Command line interface

$ docs-builder --help
Usage: [command] [options...] [-h|--help] [--version]

Converts a source markdown folder or file to an output folder

Options:
  -p|--path <string?>        Defaults to the`{pwd}/docs` folder (Default: null)
  -o|--output <string?>      Defaults to `.artifacts/html` (Default: null)
  --path-prefix <string?>    Specifies the path prefix for urls (Default: null)
  --force <bool?>            Force a full rebuild of the destination folder (Default: null)

Commands:
  generate    Converts a source markdown folder or file to an output folder
  serve       Continuously serve a documentation folder at http://localhost:5000.
	File systems changes will be reflected without having to restart the server.

In the near term native code will be published by CI for the following platforms

OS	Architectures
Windows	x64, Arm64
Linux	x64, Arm64
macOS	x64, Arm64

And we'll invest time in making sure these are easily obtainable (brew, winget, apt)

For now you can run the tool locally through docker run

docker run -v "./.git:/app/.git" -v "./docs:/app/docs" -v "./.artifacts:/app/.artifacts" \
  ghcr.io/elastic/docs-builder:edge

This ensures .git/docs and .artifacts (the default output directory) are mounted.

The tool will default to incremental compilation. Only the changed files on subsequent runs will be compiled unless you pass --force to force a new compilation.

docker run -v "./.git:/app/.git" -v "./docs:/app/docs" -v "./.artifacts:/app/.artifacts" \
  ghcr.io/elastic/docs-builder:edge --force

Live mode

Through the serve command you can continuously and partially compile your documentation.

docker run -v "./.git:/app/.git" -v "./docs:/app/docs" -v "./.artifacts:/app/.artifacts" \
  --expose 8080 ghcr.io/elastic/docs-builder:edge serve

Each page is compiled on demand as you browse http://localhost:8080 and is never cached so changes to files and navigation will always be reflected upon refresh.

Note the docker image is linux-x86 and will be somewhat slower to invoke on OSX due to virtualization.

Github Action

The docs-builder tool is available as github action.

Since it runs from a precompiled distroless image ~25mb it's able to execute snappy. (no need to wait for building the tool itself)

jobs:
  docs:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Build documentation
        uses: elastic/docs-builder@main

GitHub Pages

To setup the tool to publish to GitHub pages use the following configuration.
NOTE: In the near feature we'll make this a dedicated single step Github ction

steps:
  - id: repo-basename
    run: 'echo "value=`basename ${{ github.repository }}`" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT'
  - uses: actions/checkout@v4
  - name: Setup Pages
    id: pages
    uses: actions/configure-pages@v5.0.0
  - name: Build documentation
    uses: elastic/docs-builder@main
    with:
      prefix: '${{ steps.repo-basename.outputs.value }}'
  - name: Upload artifact
    uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v3.0.1
    with:
      path: .artifacts/docs/html
      
  - name: Deploy artifact
    id: deployment
    uses: actions/deploy-pages@v4.0.5 

Note prefix: is required to inject the appropiate --path-prefix argument to docs-builder

Also make sure your repository settings are set up to deploy from github actions see:

https://github.com/elastic/{your-repository}/settings/pages

---

---

Run without docker

If you have dotnet 8 installed you can use its CLI to publish a self-contained docs-builder native code binary. (On my M2 Pro mac the binary is currently 13mb)

$ dotnet publish "src/docs-builder/docs-builder.csproj" -c Release -o .artifacts/publish \
    --self-contained true /p:PublishTrimmed=true /p:PublishSingleFile=false /p:PublishAot=true -a arm64

Note: -a should be the machines CPU architecture

The resulting binary ./.artifacts/publish/docs-builder will run on machines without .NET installed

Performance

To test performance it's best to build the binary and run outside of docker:

For refence here's the markitpy-doc docset (50k markdown files) currently takes 14s vs several minutes compared to existing surveyed tools