mkdocs-material/docs/insiders/getting-started.md

title
Getting started with Insiders

Getting started with Insiders

Material for MkDocs Insiders is a compatible drop-in replacement for Material for MkDocs, and can be installed similarly using pip, docker or git. Note that in order to access the Insiders repository, you need to become an eligible sponsor of @squidfunk on GitHub.

Requirements

After you've been added to the list of collaborators and accepted the repository invitation, the next step is to create a personal access token for your GitHub account in order to access the Insiders repository programmatically (from the command line or GitHub Actions workflows):

1. Go to https://github.com/settings/tokens
2. Click on Generate a new token
3. Enter a name and select the repo scope
4. Generate the token and store it in a safe place

Installation

with pip

Material for MkDocs Insiders can be installed with pip:

pip install git+https://${GH_TOKEN}@github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material-insiders.git

The GH_TOKEN environment variable must be set to the value of the personal access token you generated in the previous step. Note that the personal access token must be kept secret at all times, as it allows the owner to access your private repositories.

with docker

In case you want to use Material for MkDocs Insiders from within Docker, some additional steps are necessary. While we cannot provide a hosted Docker image for Insiders¹, GitHub Container Registry allows for simple and comfortable self-hosting:

1. Fork the Insiders repository
2. Enable GitHub Actions on your fork²
3. Create a new personal access token³
   1. Go to https://github.com/settings/tokens
   2. Click on Generate a new token
   3. Enter a name and select the write:packages scope
   4. Generate the token and store it in a safe place
4. Add a GitHub Actions secret on your fork
   1. Set the name to GHCR_TOKEN
   2. Set the value to the personal access token created in the previous step
5. Create a new release to build and publish the Docker image
6. Install Pull App on your fork to stay in-sync with upstream

The publish workflow⁴ is automatically run when a new tag (release) is created. When a new Insiders version is released on the upstream repository, the Pull App will create a pull request with the changes and pull in the new tag, which is picked up by the publish workflow that builds and publishes the Docker image automatically to your private registry.

Now, you should be able to pull the Docker image from your private registry:

docker login -u ${GH_USERNAME} -p ${GHCR_TOKEN} ghcr.io
docker pull ghcr.io/${GH_USERNAME}/mkdocs-material-insiders

Should you wish to add additional plugins to the insiders container image, follow the steps outlined in the Getting Started guide.

with git

Of course, you can use Material for MkDocs Insiders directly from git:

git clone git@github.com:squidfunk/mkdocs-material-insiders.git mkdocs-material

The theme will reside in the folder mkdocs-material/material. When cloning from git, the theme must be installed, so MkDocs can find the built-in plugins:

pip install -e mkdocs-material

Upgrading

When upgrading Insiders, you should always check the version of Material for MkDocs which makes up the first part of the version qualifier, e.g.Insiders 4.x.x is currently based on 8.x.x:

8.x.x-insiders-4.x.x

If the major version increased, it's a good idea to consult the upgrade guide and go through the steps to ensure your configuration is up to date and all necessary changes have been made. If you installed Insiders via pip, you can upgrade your installation with the following command:

pip install --upgrade git+https://${GH_TOKEN}@github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material-insiders.git

Built-in plugins

When you're using built-in plugins that are solely available via Insiders, outside contributors won't be able to build your documentation project on their local machine. This is the reason why we developed the built-in group plugin that allows to conditionally load plugins.

Built-in group plugin

:octicons-tag-24: 9.3.0 · :octicons-cpu-24: Plugin · :octicons-beaker-24: Experimental

The built-in group plugin adds support for conditionally loading plugins based on environments. This makes enabling and disabling of multiple plugins much simpler, as you can group them into logical units and enable or disable them with an environment variable:

plugins:
  - group:
      enabled: !ENV CI
      plugins:
        - optimize
        - minify

enabled{ #+group.enabled }

:octicons-milestone-24: Default: false – This option specifies whether the plugin is enabled when building your project. By default, the plugin is disabled, so you can use an environment variable:

plugins:
  - group:
      enabled: !ENV CI

Now, If you invoke MkDocs with that environment variable (or export the environment variable before invoking MkDocs), the plugin will be enabled:

CI=true mkdocs build

plugins{ #+group.plugins }

:octicons-milestone-24: Default: none – This option specifies the plugins that the group plugin should load when enabled. Note that the plugins must be specified as a list, even if there's only one plugin:

plugins:
  - group:
      plugins:
        - optimize
        - minify

The syntax is exactly the same as for all other plugins.

---

1. Earlier, Insiders provided a dedicated Docker image which was available to all sponsors. On March 21, 2021, the image was deprecated for the reasons outlined and discussed in #2442. It was removed on June 1, 2021. ↩︎

2. When forking a repository, GitHub will disable all workflows. While this is a reasonable default setting, you need to enable GitHub Actions to be able to automatically build and publish a Docker image on GitHub Container Registry. ↩︎

3. While you could just add the write:packages scope to the personal access token created to access the Insiders repository, it's safer to create a dedicated token which you'll only use for publishing the Docker image. ↩︎

4. The Insiders repository contains two GitHub Actions workflows:

   • build.yml – Build and lint the project (disabled on forks)
   • publish.yml – Build and publish the Docker image
   ↩︎