CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mkdocsmkdocs-material
icedwater
icedwater

Reputation: 4887

Building documentation behind a symlink

I've built an internal documentation site using Material for MkDocs but I would like to provide multiple project readmes by symlinking folders from their own git repos into the docs/ folder. That is, given two projects:

  1. /home/user/projects/first_project.git which has documentation in Guide/
  2. /projects/second_project.git which has its documentation also in Guide/

I can copy /home/user/projects/first_project/Guide into the docs/ directory and it serves the necessary documentation.

But since I don't want to potentially forget to rsync folders, I thought I should symlink them:

ln -s /home/user/projects/first_project/Guide docs/first_project_guide
ln -s /projects/second_project/Guide docs/second_project_guide

This lets me access the separate guide folders in the command line, but mkdocs doesn't seem to know how to build through symlinks. Does anyone know how I can configure mkdocs to do so?

This is the error I see:

INFO    -  [01:57:11] Detected file changes
INFO    -  Building documentation...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/mkdocs/livereload/__init__.py", line 193, in _build_loop
    func()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/mkdocs/commands/serve.py", line 67, in builder
    build(config, live_server=None if is_clean else server, dirty=is_dirty)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/mkdocs/commands/build.py", line 337, in build
    files.copy_static_files(dirty=dirty, inclusion=inclusion)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/mkdocs/structure/files.py", line 111, in copy_static_files
    file.copy_file(dirty)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/mkdocs/structure/files.py", line 290, in copy_file
    utils.copy_file(self.abs_src_path, self.abs_dest_path)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/mkdocs/utils/__init__.py", line 132, in copy_file
    shutil.copyfile(source_path, output_path)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.11/shutil.py", line 256, in copyfile
    with open(src, 'rb') as fsrc:
         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/docs/first_project_guide'

Note: This is a duplicate of https://superuser.com/q/1827866/231154 because I first thought it would be more appropriate to ask there, but I don't have enough reputation to create tags there which already exist here.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 334

Answers (1)

fccoelho
fccoelho

Reputation: 6204

I was having the same issue. Then I switched to hardlinks and it works.

Just to ln <source> <destination> instead of ln-s

Upvotes: 1

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