Contributing to MkDocs

An introduction to contributing to the MkDocs project.

The MkDocs project welcomes contributions from developers and users in the open source community. Contributions can be made in a number of ways, a few examples are:

• Code patches via pull requests
• Documentation improvements
• Bug reports and patch reviews

For information about available communication channels please refer to the README file in our GitHub repository.

Reporting an Issue

Please include as much detail as you can. Let us know your platform and MkDocs version. If the problem is visual (for example a theme or design issue), please add a screenshot. If you get an error, please include the full error message and traceback.

It is particularly helpful if an issue report touches on all of these aspects:

1. What are you trying to achieve?

2. What is your mkdocs.yml configuration (+ other relevant files)? Preferably reduced to the minimal reproducible example.

3. What did you expect to happen when applying this setup?

4. What happened instead and how didn't it match your expectation?

Trying out the Development Version

If you want to just install and try out the latest development version of MkDocs (in case it already contains a fix for your issue), you can do so with the following command. This can be useful if you want to provide feedback for a new feature or want to confirm if a bug you have encountered is fixed in the git master. It is strongly recommended that you do this within a virtualenv.

pip install git+https://github.com/mkdocs-ng/mkdocs.git

Installing for Development

Note that for development you can just use Hatch directly as described below. If you wish to install a local clone of MkDocs anyway, you can run pip install --editable .. It is strongly recommended that you do this within a virtualenv.

Installing Hatch

The main tool that is used for development is Hatch. It manages dependencies (in a virtualenv that is created on the fly) and is also the command runner.

So first, install it. Ideally in an isolated way with pipx install hatch (after [installing pipx]), or just pip install hatch as a more well-known way.

For repository hooks, install pre-commit as well. Ideally use pipx install pre-commit, or pip install pre-commit if you prefer. The Markdown and JavaScript hooks also require Node.js to be available on your PATH.

Running repository hooks

To run the same repository-wide hooks as CI, use the following command in the cloned MkDocs repository:

pre-commit run --all-files

This runs the hooks defined in .pre-commit-config.yaml, including Python formatting and linting, spelling, YAML/TOML validation, Markdown linting, and JavaScript linting.

If you want these hooks to run automatically on each commit, install them into your local Git checkout:

pre-commit install

Running tests

To run the test suite for MkDocs, run the following commands:

hatch run test:test
hatch run integration:test

It will attempt to run the tests against all of the Python versions we support. So don't be concerned if you are missing some. The rest will be verified by GitHub Actions when you submit a pull request.

Python code style

Python code within MkDocs' code base is formatted using Ruff's formatter and Isort and lint-checked using Ruff. The shared repository hooks live in .pre-commit-config.yaml, and GitHub Actions runs those hooks directly to avoid drift.

You can check and automatically format the repository according to these tools with the following command:

pre-commit run --all-files

The code is also type-checked using mypy - also configured in pyproject.toml, it can be run like this:

hatch run types:check

Documentation of MkDocs itself

After making edits to files under the docs/ dir, you can preview the site locally using the following command:

hatch run docs:serve

Note that any 'WARNING' should be resolved before submitting a contribution.

Documentation files are also checked by the repository hooks, so you should run this as well:

pre-commit run --all-files

If you add a new plugin to mkdocs.yml, you don't need to add it to any "requirements" file, because that is managed automatically.

.venv/bin/pip install --editable .
.venv/bin/pip install $(mkdocs get-deps)  # Additional dependencies from mkdocs.yml plugins/themes.

Translating themes

To localize a theme to your favorite language, follow the guide on Translating Themes. We welcome translation pull requests!

Submitting Pull Requests

If you're considering a large code contribution to MkDocs, please prefer to open an issue first to get early feedback on the idea.

Once you think the code is ready to be reviewed, push it to your fork and send a pull request. For a change to be accepted it will most likely need to have tests and documentation if it is a new feature.

When working with a pull request branch: Unless otherwise agreed, prefer commit over amend, and merge over rebase. Avoid force-pushes, otherwise review history is much harder to navigate. For the end result, the "unclean" history is fine because most pull requests are squash-merged on GitHub.

Do not add to release-notes.md, this will be written later.

Submitting changes to the builtin themes

When installed with i18n support (pip install 'mkdocs[i18n]'), MkDocs allows themes to support being translated into various languages (referred to as locales) if they respect Jinja's i18n extension by wrapping text placeholders with {% trans %} and {% endtrans %} tags.

Each time a translatable text placeholder is added, removed or changed in a theme template, the theme's Portable Object Template (pot) file needs to be updated by running the extract_messages command. To update the pot file for both built-in themes, run these commands:

pybabel extract --project=MkDocs --copyright-holder=MkDocs --msgid-bugs-address='https://github.com/mkdocs-ng/mkdocs/issues' --no-wrap --version="$(hatch version)" --mapping-file mkdocs/themes/babel.cfg --output-file mkdocs/themes/mkdocs/messages.pot mkdocs/themes/mkdocs
pybabel extract --project=MkDocs --copyright-holder=MkDocs --msgid-bugs-address='https://github.com/mkdocs-ng/mkdocs/issues' --no-wrap --version="$(hatch version)" --mapping-file mkdocs/themes/babel.cfg --output-file mkdocs/themes/readthedocs/messages.pot mkdocs/themes/readthedocs

The updated pot file should be included in a PR with the updated template. The updated pot file will allow translation contributors to propose the translations needed for their preferred language. See the guide on Translating Themes for details.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the MkDocs project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms, and mailing lists is expected to follow the PyPA Code of Conduct.