Mike and legacy (non-mkdocs) website

[jponge]

Hi, I'm in the process of migrating a project documentation to MkDocs Material and use Mike.

I've read both projects documentation but it's not clear to me how to switch but keep a version alias for the previous website that we had (plain Jekyll).
I have other projects where we started with MkDocs/Mike from scratch, but it's not the case here.

Going forward I'd like to have Mike manage versions, but I'd like to setup Mike so that I can have a version for the previous Jekyll-rendered content which currently lives in the gh-pages branch.

Thanks for any pointer you may have 🙏

[squidfunk]

Excellent question and definitely a sound use case. Material for MkDocs only consumes what mike generates, i.e. the versions.json. Theoretically, this file could include versions or links to other websites, so the user would be taken to that site when the respective version is selected. However, I'm not sure whether mike supports this, so maybe ask on their issue tracker.

As a quick idea, you could theoretically post-process the versions.json, add the links manually and then just add a redirect for that version to an external site. This could all be done with some scripting and post-processing, but as said, I find that to be a sound use case so definitely something that could be discussed with the maintainers of mike. If mike would support that, I'd be happy to make any changes necessary to get that working with Material for MkDocs.

[jponge]

Thanks for these notes!

Meanwhile I've tested deploying to:

• a clean branch: mike does add all files as needed
• an existing gh-pages branch: mike adds files (including versions.json) but does not overwrite any existing index.html, which may be an issue.

Perhaps that's asking too much of mike TBH, it's probably sound to eiher

• clean the existing gh-pages branch, or
• manually move the existing files in a folder, then as you said edit versions.json afterwards.

[squidfunk]

I guess it's currently not possible without some manular work, patching in what you want after mike has been deployed. As I suggested, maybe something to discuss with the maintainers of mike, since I believe that this might come up more often.

[jponge]

See jimporter/mike#110