Building Your Documentation With MkDocs

00:00 Build Your Documentation With MkDocs.

00:05 At this point, you should have written all your documentation pages and the project structure file. At the end of this step, you’ll have built your documentation and be ready to deploy it online.

00:17 You’ve already built your documentation using the serve command. This command builds a development version of your documentation and makes it available locally on the URL you used earlier. Serving your documentation like this is helpful during development because any changes you apply will update straight away. However, once you’ve finished developing your documentation, you’ll want to build it without starting a server.

00:40 After all, MkDocs is a static-site generator that allows you to create documentation that you can host without running a server. To build the documentation and create the site/ directory that will contain all the necessary assets and static files, you can use the build command.

01:00 When you build your documentation with this command, MkDocs creates a site/ directory. That directory will contain all of the documentation converted to HTML pages, as well as the static assets that are necessary to build a Material for MkDocs theme, as seen on-screen.

01:18 The folder structure is a self-contained static representation of your documentation. It will look exactly as served by MkDocs during development.

01:28 It will work from any user’s file system if they download the documentation, and you can also host it on any static-site hosting service to get your documentation in front of your users.

01:41 And in the next section of the course, you’ll see how to host this documentation on GitHub.