Proposal: versioning

versioning

Summary

Support for creating docs for different versions.

Motivation

Versioning support in a documentation generator is quite helping as it helps in supporting separating the docs for different versions. Helps is covering breaking changes. Improves readability. There are other documentation generators that support this like docusaurus, gitbook etc.

Detailed Design

This will mainly require to make changes in the docsify-cli repo. I don’t think we need any changes in the core. We have great support for having navbar We will make use of that.

• Configuration

...
$docsify = {
  version : {
   // none I guess
 }
}
...

We can either make it to the navbar.

• cli command

docsify version <version> <path? = '.'>

This will do the following work in sequence

1. it will create a version with name <version> in <path>
2. check for the navbar markdown content i.e _navbar.md
3. if present, good to go. If not present, ask whether the CLI can create a new one or not. If the CLI is answered with no. Stop the operation
4. Update the _navbar.md by pretending the content with creating a new list versions. First, it will check whether versions are present as list heading or not. and inside that, append the list with the <version>. Use the AST for the markdown content in order to prepend, append, and check for the version list heading. (probably use remark)
5. it will copy-paste every files/folder present in the current directory from where this command is being run i.e process.cwd() to that folder i.e <path>/<version>
6. Done

Documentation

Create a versioning page in main docs. Create CLI command docs in the docsify-cli and either embed or do the remote rendering in the main docs in order to always show the latest docs

Drawbacks

Few cons or drawbacks

• it mandates the use of _navbar.md
• cant be customizable.
• <please comment if you find any>

Backwards Compatibility Analysis

Not required. As it will need changes in the cli not in the core.

Alternatives

Manually copy-pasting the files/folder and changing the _navbar.md

Open Questions

• do we want this on the sidebar? I tried but it was not looking good.

Help Needed

• Please provide some ( edge ) cases where this might break.
• Provide some suggestions to refine the proposal.
• At last, anyone wants to implement/take this ?

Frequently Asked Questions

N/A

Related Discussions

Forgot the repo + issue. But I did notice few issues and requests for this.

[DanielPenning]

I second @Piotr1215 and @FaultyFunctions Any progress here? Versioning the docs is a really important feature. Current workaround with manually creating other docsify-folders with older versions and then linking to them is a pain. In my opinion the growing repo size would be acceptable.

[superchango2017]

I second @Piotr1215 and @FaultyFunctions. Versioning is something a lot of people need. Would be great to see progress.