Upstream Issues Fixed in MkDocs NG

MkDocs NG is a maintained fork of mkdocs/mkdocs, which is no longer under active development. Beyond keeping up with new Python releases and dependencies, the fork resolves long-standing issues that were reported upstream but never fixed there.

This page tracks notable upstream issues that are already resolved in MkDocs NG. If you are affected by one of them, upgrading is a one-line change — the package name on PyPI is mkdocs-ng, while the mkdocs command and all configuration stay the same:

pip uninstall mkdocs && pip install -U mkdocs-ng

Configuration

Upstream issue Symptom Fixed in
#2624 INHERIT accepted a single parent file, so splitting a configuration into several files required chaining them one after another. It now accepts a list of files. 2.0.0 (#107)

Development server

Upstream issue Symptom Fixed in
#4032, #4014, #4055, #4081 With click>=8.2, mkdocs serve stopped watching for file changes, live reload only worked when --livereload was passed explicitly (often misdiagnosed as a WSL problem), and use_directory_urls was overridden. 1.7.0 (#4), 1.7.3 (#60)
#2519 Editor temporary files (vim swap files, ~ backups, Emacs auto-save) triggered pointless rebuilds. 1.7.3 (#55)
#4001 Edge-case markup such as <<>> crashed the build with AssertionError from Python's html.parser (seen on Python 3.13.5+). 1.7.3 (#51)

Built-in themes

Upstream issue Symptom Fixed in
#2171 Built-in themes loaded resources from CDNs, sharing visitor data with third parties and breaking offline use. highlight.js is now bundled locally and the themes contain no CDN references. 1.8.0 (#75)
#3630 The long-dead Universal Analytics (analytics.js) snippet was hardcoded into the themes. It is removed; use analytics.gtag (GA4) or override the analytics template block. 1.8.0 (#84)
#4045 Disabling highlightjs broke switching between light and dark mode in the mkdocs theme. 1.7.1 (#39)
Upstream issue Symptom Fixed in
#4167 Searching for words that happen to be English stop words — while, if, for, from and many more — returned no results, even though they are meaningful keywords in technical documentation. Stop words are now indexed by default; a stop_words plugin option restores the old behavior. 1.8.0 (#80)
#4106 In browsers without Web Worker support, search replaced the page's global window.postMessage function, breaking other scripts that rely on it. The fallback now leaves it alone (and no longer depends on jQuery or on the site being served from the domain root). 2.0.0 (#106)
Upstream issue Symptom Fixed in
#3710 When the same page was listed more than once in nav under different titles, every entry showed the title of the first one. Each entry now keeps its own title. 2.0.0 (#103)
#4026 A nav entry that links to a section of a page (page.md#anchor or page/#anchor) was reported as "not found in the documentation files", failing strict builds; the page.md#anchor form also produced a broken link. Both forms now work without a warning. 2.0.0 (#104)

Validation

Upstream issue Symptom Fixed in
#3690 Anchor validation reported false positives for anchors generated late by Markdown extensions, e.g. pymdownx.tabbed with combine_header_slug. 1.7.1 (#34)
#3696 Using a deprecated configuration option — including deprecated options of plugins — emitted a WARNING, so strict builds failed although the option still worked or was harmless. Deprecation notices are now logged at INFO level. 2.0.0 (#102)
#3703 The "does not contain an anchor" warning gave no hint when the only problem was letter case; it now suggests the correct anchor (did you mean '#conflicts'?). 1.8.0 (#83)
#4126 mkdocs build --quiet --strict exited successfully even when there were warnings, because --quiet stopped warnings from being counted. Warnings are now still counted in strict mode; only their output is silenced. 2.0.0 (#101)

Python API

Upstream issue Symptom Fixed in
#1240 No stable programmatic API — running MkDocs from Python code required subprocess calls or private imports. MkDocs NG provides mkdocs.build() and mkdocs.serve(). 1.8.0 (#76)

Output for LLMs

Upstream issue Symptom Fixed in
#3973 No way to publish the documentation's Markdown for LLMs and coding agents; converting the HTML back to Markdown loses precision. The built-in llms_txt plugin publishes each page's Markdown and an llms.txt index. 2.0.0 (#105)

Also worth knowing

  • Python 3.13 and 3.14 are fully supported and tested (added in 1.7.0), while upstream's last release predates them.
  • Found another upstream issue you'd like to see fixed here? Please open an issue.