Automate your Documentation with Gitlab and Mkdocs

Producing documentation may be painful and need a lot of time to write and operate. In this story, i will share with you, my way of generating docs using the devops approach. To make life easier, we will explore the art of automation 😃.

Let’s go folks 😙

Create a Gitlab repo

This is straightforward, follow these steps:

• Log in to your GitLab
• Click new project
• Give it a name: auto_docs
• Initialize it with a README.md file
• Make it public or private
• Hit create

Now clone the project by copying the URL and run this command :
$ git clone https://gitlab.com/auto_docs.git

Setting up the environment

I’m using a Linux environment but it is possible to reproduce the same steps on a Windows machine.
In order to follow me, you need a set of tools that must be available on your machine … make sure to to have python3 installed, I have python 3.8 (latest).

Creating a virtual environment

The easiest way to set up a virtual environment is to install virtualenv python package by executing pip install virtualenv .

Navigate to your local GitLab repository and create a new virtual environment.

$ cd auto_docs/
$ virtualenv autodocs
$ source autodocs/bin/acivate

Installing Mkdocs Material

Make sure that the virtual environment is active.
Install the mkdocs material with this command : pip install mkdocs-material.
This package needs some dependencies to work .. install them by using a requirement.txt file, copy-paste the dependencies list to filename requirements.txt

Babel==2.8.0
click==7.1.1
future==0.18.2
gitdb==4.0.4
GitPython==3.1.1
htmlmin==0.1.12
Jinja2==2.11.2
joblib==0.14.1
jsmin==2.2.2
livereload==2.6.1
lunr==0.5.6
Markdown==3.2.1
MarkupSafe==1.1.1
mkdocs==1.1
mkdocs-awesome-pages-plugin==2.2.1
mkdocs-git-revision-date-localized-plugin==0.5.0
mkdocs-material==5.1.1
mkdocs-material-extensions==1.0b1
mkdocs-minify-plugin==0.3.0
nltk==3.5
Pygments==2.6.1
pymdown-extensions==7.0
pytz==2019.3
PyYAML==5.3.1
regex==2020.4.4
six==1.14.0
smmap==3.0.2
tornado==6.0.4
tqdm==4.45.0

Install them all with one command : pip install -r requirements.txt

Now it’s time to create a new mkdocs project 😅.

Run this command : mkdocs new . and verify that you have this structure :

|--auto_docs
    |--- docs
    |--- mkdocs.yml

• The docs folder contains the structure of your documentation, it contains subfolders and markdown files.
• The mkdocs.yml file defines the configuration of the generated site. Let's test the installation by running this command : mkdocs serve . The site will be accessible on http://locahost:8000 and you should see the initial look of the docs.

Setting up the CI/CD

let’s enable le CI/CD to automate the build and the deployment of the docs. Notice that GitLab offers a feature called gitlab pages that can serve for free a static resource (HTML, js, CSS). The repo path is converted to an URL to your docs.

Create the CI/CD file

Gitlab uses a YAML file — it holds the pipeline configuration.
The CI file content:

stages :
  - build
pages:
  stage: build
  image:
  name: squidfunk/mkdocs-material
  entrypoint:
    - ""
  script:
    - mkdocs build
    - mv site public
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public
  only:
    - master
  tags:
    - gitlab-org-docker

This pipeline uses a docker executor with an image that contains mkdocs already installed… mkdocs build the project and put the build assets on a folder called site … to be able to use GitLab pages you have to name your job pages and put the site assets into a new folder called public.
For tags: check the runner's section under settings → CI/CD →Runners and pick one of the shared runners that have a tag GitLab-org-docker.
All things were done 🎉 🎉 😸 !

Oh ! just one thing … we forgot the virtual environment files .. they are big and not needed on the pipeline … they are for the local development only. The mkdocs image on the pipeline is already shipped with the necessary packages.
So … create a new file called .gitignore and add these lines:

auto_docs/ 
requirements.txt

The auto_docs folder has the same name as the virtual environment .. don't forget 😠! you will be punished by pushing +100Mi 😝 and you will wait your whole life to complete the process haha 😢.

Now run git add . && git commit -m "initial commit" a && git push… go to your GitLab repo and click CI/CD → pipelines, click on the blue icon and visualize the logs .. once the job succeeded, navigate to settings -> pages and click the link of your new documentation site (you have to wait for 10m~ to be accessible)

Finally, I hope this was helpful ! thanks for reading 😺 😍!