MkDocs Behave Plugin

A MkDocs plugin to render behave feature files.

Installation

pip install mkdocs-behave

Usage

Add the following to mkdocs.yml:

plugins:
  - behave

Feature files in features/ in the project root will be converted to Markdown and included in MkDocs navigation under the heading Features.

Live preview

While previewing documentation using mkdocs serve, feature files will be watched for changes in the same manner as Markdown files under docs/

Markdown in feature files

Markdown can be used in the description text of features. However, behave does not preserve leading whitespace in descriptions.

To protect Markdown in descriptions, prepend dots to a block:

Feature: My feature

  . - A multi-level list
  .   - with indentation
  .     - that would otherwise be lost

Scenario: ...

Specifically, the following are stripped at the beginning of a line of description before it is processed as Markdown:

• A dot followed by a space
• A dot followed by a newline (i.e. no further text)

(Leading whitespace before the dots is stripped by behave)

Configuration

Configuration options can be set beneath the plugin entry in mkdocs.yml.

plugins:
  - behave:
      <option>: <value>
      # ...

The following options are available:

Example of syntax highlighting configuration:

plugins:
  - behave:
      step_highlight: {
        'file named ".*\.py"': python,
        'webpage containing': html,
      }

Modes of operation

1. Fully automatic feature population

This is the default. All feature files are populated into the navigation, sorted alphanumerically.

Subdirectories under the features directory are turned into subheadings under the main navigation heading. Directory names are processed as follows:

• Underscores (_) are replaced with spaces
• The first character is capitalised

2. Partly manual feature population

To explicitly order features and subheadings, add suitable entries into the navigation in mkdocs.yml. You can also insert additional Markdown files.

nav:
  - Features:
      - features/index.md
      - features/first.feature
      - Sub heading:
          - features/sub_heading/second.feature
      - ...

Note that in this example, features/index.md is read from under docs as normal, but the entries ending in .feature are read from the features directory in the project root.

Any features that are not explicitly listed in the expected heading are populated at the end of the heading.

To control the placement of the top-level features heading without otherwise adjusting its contents, insert it into the navigation as a blank heading:

nav:
  - A heading:
    - ...
  - Features: []
  - Another heading:
    - ...

3. Fully manual feature population

Set populate: false to lay out features in the navigation entirely manually. A warning will be issued if feature files present on disk are missing from the navigation, mirroring the behaviour of MkDocs for Markdown files.

To disable this and allow only a subset of features to be included, set warn_missing: false

Licence

mkdocs-behave is distributed under the terms of the MIT licence.