Getting started with MkDocs

MkDocs is a documentation generator that focuses on speed and simplicity. It has many great features including:

  • Preview your documentation as you write it

  • Easy customization with themes and extensions

  • Writing documentation with Markdown

Note

MkDocs is a great choice for building technical documentation. However, Read the Docs also supports Sphinx, another tool for writing and building documentation.

Quick start

See also

If you already have a Mkdocs project, check out our Importing your documentation guide.

Assuming you have Python already, install MkDocs:

pip install mkdocs

Setup your MkDocs project:

mkdocs new .

This command creates mkdocs.yml which holds your MkDocs configuration, and docs/index.md which is the Markdown file that is the entry point for your documentation.

You can edit this index.md file to add more details about your project and then you can build your documentation:

mkdocs serve

This command builds your Markdown files into HTML and starts a development server to browse your documentation. Open up http://127.0.0.1:8000/ in your web browser to see your documentation. You can make changes to your Markdown files and your docs will automatically rebuild.

../../_images/mkdocs-hello-world.png

Your MkDocs project is built

Once you have your documentation in a public repository such as GitHub, Bitbucket, or GitLab, you can start using Read the Docs by importing your docs.

Warning

We strongly recommend to pin the MkDocs version used for your project to build the docs to avoid potential future incompatibilities.

Get inspired!

You might learn more and find the first ingredients for starting your own documentation project by looking at Example projects - view live example renditions and copy & paste from the accompanying source code.

External resources

Here are some external resources to help you learn more about MkDocs.