WIP: This cli is a work in progress. It is not ready for use yet. Follow our progress on the Backstage Discord under #docs-like-code or on our GitHub Milestone.

Commands

# Serve localhost:3000 (and localhost:8000)
yarn serve

# Serve localhost:8000 containing your Mkdocs documentation.
yarn serve:mkdocs

Getting Started

You'll need Docker installed and running to use this. You will also need to build the container located at /packages/techdocs-container under the tag mkdocs:local-dev, as you can see in the commands from below:

docker build packages/techdocs-container -t mkdocs:local-dev

From that point, you can invoke the CLI from any project with a docs folder. Try out our example!

cd packages/techdocs-container/mock-docs
npx @techdocs/cli serve

Local Development

You'll need Docker installed and running to use this. You will also need to build the container located at packages/techdocs-container under the tag mkdocs:local-dev (for now until we deploy the container to a centralized Docker registry), as you can see in the commands from below:

docker build packages/techdocs-container -t mkdocs:local-dev

cd packages/techdocs-container/mock-docs
npx techdocs serve

You should have a localhost:3000 serving TechDocs in Backstage, as well as localhost:8000 serving Mkdocs (which won't open up and be exposed to the user).

Happy hacking!

Deploying a new version

Deploying the Node packages to NPM happens automatically on merge to master through GitHub Actions. The deployment happens through Lerna which determines which packages throughout the Backstage project have changed. In our case, the package is called techdocs-cli in the repository but @techdocs/cli in the NPM registry.

Note: Once a package is published under a version, any subsequent changes will not override that version. You will need to bump up the version across the entire Backstage repository, which can be done through Lerna (see the command below).

In order to bump up all packages, go to the root of the Backstage repository. To see the current version see the lerna.json under the version key. To then update all the versions (locally on your machine), run the following:

git checkout -b bump-up-version
yarn lerna version --no-push --allow-branch --yes

Upon being merged to master, Lerna will then automatically publish these packages as configured by the Backstage core team.