dvci 1.2.0.dev0

Manage multiple versions of your Docums-powered documentation

dvci

Installation

Like most Python projects, dvci uses setuptools, so installation is what you might expect:

pip install dvci

Once you've installed dvci, you might also want to set up shell-completion for it. If you have shtab installed, you can do this with dvci generate-completion, which will print the shell-completion code for your shell. For more details on how to set this up, consult shtab's documentation.

Usage

Initialization

Before using dvci for the first time, you may want to add the dvci plugin to your docums.yml file. This plugin is added by default when building your documentation with dvci, but by adding it explicitly, you can configure how it works. The plugin adds a version selector to supported themes as well as updating the site_url (if you set it) to point to the version of the docs that are being built:

plugins:
  - dvci:
      # these fields are all optional; the defaults are as below...
      version_selector: true   # set to false to leave out the version selector
      css_dir: css             # the directory to put the version selector's CSS
      javascript_dir: js       # the directory to put the version selector's JS
      canonical_version: null  # the version for <link rel="canonical">; `null`
                               # uses the version specified via `dvci deploy`

Note: If you have existing documentation on your gh-pages branch, you may also want to delete the old documentation before building your new versioned docs via dvci delete --all.)

Building Your Docs

dvci is designed to produce one version of your docs at a time. That way, you can easily deploy a new version without touching any older versions of your docs; this can be especially important if your old docs are no longer buildable with the newest version of Docums (or if they weren't built with Docums at all!). To deploy the current version of your docs, simply run:

dvci deploy [version]

Where [version] is the current version of your project, represented however you like (I recommend using [major].[minor] and excluding the patch number). You can also pass aliases to the deploy command to host a particularly-relevant version of your docs somewhere special (e.g. latest):

dvci deploy [version] [alias]...

If [version] already exists, this command will also update all of the pre-existing aliases for it. Normally, if an alias specified on the command line is already associated with another version, this will return an error. If you do want to move an alias from another version to this version (e.g. when releasing a new version and updating the latest alias to point to this new version), you can pass -u/--update-aliases to allow this.

By default, aliases create a simple HTML redirect to the real version of the docs; to create a copy of the docs for each alias, you can pass --no-redirect. If you're using redirects, you can customize the redirect template with -T/--template; this takes a path to a Jinja template that accepts an {{href}} variable.

If you'd like to specify a title for this version that doesn't match the version string, you can pass -t TITLE/--title=TITLE as well.

In addition, you can specify where to deploy your docs via -b/--branch, -r/--remote, and --prefix, specifying the branch, remote, and directory prefix within the branch, respectively. Finally, to push your docs to a remote branch, simply add -p/--push to your command.

Viewing Your Docs

To test that your docs have been built as expected, you can serve them locally from a dev server:

dvci serve

By default, this serves the docs on http://localhost:8000, but you can change this with -a/--dev-addr. Remember though, this is for testing only. To host your docs for real, you should use a real web server.

Deleting Docs

Sometimes you need to delete an old version of your docs, either because you made a mistake or you're pruning unsupported versions. You can do this via the delete subcommand:

dvci delete [version-or-alias]...

If version-or-alias is a version, this will delete the version and all its aliases from the branch; if it's an alias, it will only delete that alias.

If you'd like to completely wipe the contents of your docs branch, just run dvci delete --all. Like deploy above, you can specify --branch, --push, etc to control how the commit is handled.

Listing Docs

If you ever need to see the list of all currently-deployed doc versions, you can run:

dvci list

To list the info for a particular version, you can just pass the version or alias:

dvci list [version-or-alias]

Sometimes, you need this information to be consumed by another tool. In that case, pass -j/--json to return the list of doc versions as JSON.

Setting the Default Version

With all the versions of docs you have, you may want to set a default version so that people going to the root of your site are redirected to the latest version of the docs:

dvci set-default [version-or-alias]

If you want to use a different template from the default, you can pass -T/--template; this takes a path to a Jinja template that accepts an {{href}} variable.

Like deploy and delete above, you can specify --branch, --push, etc to control how the commit is handled.

Changing a Version's Title

As you update your docs, you may want to change the title of a particular version. For example, your 1.0 docs might have the title 1.0.0, and when you release a new patch, you want to update the title to 1.0.1. You can do this with the retitle command:

dvci retitle [version-or-alias] [title]

As with other commands that change your docs, you can specify --branch, --push, etc to control how the commit is handled.

Adding a New Version Alias

Sometimes, you might need to add a new alias for a version without rebuilding your documentation. You can use the alias command for this:

dvci alias [version-or-alias] [alias]...

As with deploy, you can pass -u/--update-aliases to change where an existing alias points to.

Once again, you can specify --branch, --push, etc to control how the commit is handled.

More Details

For more details on the available options, consult the --help command for dvci.

Staying in Sync

dvci will do its best to stay in-sync with your remote repository and will automatically update your local branch to match the remote's if possible (note that dvci won't automatically git fetch anything). If your local branch has diverged from your remote, dvci will leave it as-is and ask you what to do. To ignore the remote's state, just pass --ignore; to update to the remote's state, pass --rebase.

CNAME (and Other Special Files)

Some special files that you'd like to deploy along with your documentation (such as CNAME) aren't related to a particular version of the docs, and instead need to go in the root directory of your site. There's no special handling for this in dvci, but since your built docs live on a Git branch, it's still easy to manage: check out your gh-pages branch (or wherever your built docs live), and commit the necessary files to the root directory.

Deploying via CI

Since dvci just generates commits to an ordinary Git branch, it should work smoothly with your favorite CI system. However, you should keep in mind that some CI systems make shallow clones of your repository, meaning that the CI job won't have a local instance of your documentation branch to commit to. This will naturally cause issues when trying to push the commit. This is easy to resolve though; just manually fetch your gh-pages branch (or whichever you deploy to) before running dvci:

git fetch origin gh-pages --depth=1

You may also need to configure a Git user so that dvci can make commits:

git config user.name ci-bot
git config user.email [e-mail]

For Theme Authors

If you'd like to provide support for dvci in your theme, you just need to fetch versions.json and build a version selector. versions.json looks like this:

[
  {"version": "1.0", "title": "1.0.1", "aliases": ["latest"]},
  {"version": "0.9", "title": "0.9", "aliases": []}
]

If you're creating a third-party extension to an existing theme, you add a setuptools entry point for dvci.themes pointing to a Python submodule that contains css/ and js/ subdirectories containing the extra code to be installed into the user's documentation. This will then automatically be included via the dvci plugin in the user's docums.yml file.

To see some examples of how to work with this, check the dvci/themes/docums directory.

License

This project is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license.