Using alias to mark the latest version, but not using it in hrefs

[hellt]

Hi @jimporter

I think I have a narrow use case, but I think it is a valid one.

I would like my docs to default to the latest versioned URL instead of an alias when the users visit the root of my docs.

Example, if I have v1 and v2 and v2 is alised as latest, I want my users to land at mysite.com/v2 when they type mysite.com and not mysite.com/latest.

At the same time, I need to keep the latest alias, since this is how my doc engine notifies if the user is browsing not the latest version.

Is it possible to achieve this?

PS> the reason I want users not to have alias in the hrefs is because path structure can change between the versions, and /latest/foo/bar can become /latest/foo/baz and this will lead to broken links.

[hellt]

I think setting the default version to v2 is the answer here. I will check with mkdocs-material if the logic of detecting the outdated version can/should be adapted to work with non-latest default versions

[jimporter]

That's probably how I'd do it.

Another option is to use alias_type: redirect, which will create HTML redirects from your alias (e.g. latest) to the real version URL (e.g. v2). So when a user visits example.com/latest/somewhere, they'll get sent to example.com/v2/somewhere, so if they bookmark or copy/paste the URL anywhere, they get the v2 URL. Note that the HTML redirects only work for pages that actually exist in that version of the docs; it can't handle redirecting from a 404.