Prefect Versioned Documentation

This repository contains Prefect's versioned documentation. Development of the docs happens in the docs directory of the main Prefect repository, so any edits or additions should be done there.

The docs repository serves two purposes:

1. Build versioned documentation via a GitHub action.
2. Make versioned docs available for publishing via Netlify.

How it works

First, the docs build action is triggered, either manually or by an automatic repository dispatch call from the PrefectHQ/prefect repository.

Next, the build happens in the build workflow action.

To keep things simple, the workflow primarily consists of Bash commands that clone the a branch or release tag of the Prefect repository, prepare it for the mike build utility, sort the versions list mike generates, and then create a pull request to merge the changes into main.

The workflow calls several small Python scripts in the utilities directory to handle scripts handle preparation steps that would be difficult or verbose in bash.

Manual docs builds

Manually triggered builds accept two parameters:

• A version
• An optional display name that's displayed in the version selector box.

Choosing version and display name

If you don't provide a version name, the build action uses the version as the display name. In most cases, this is what you want. If you're building the docs for 2.10.4, for example, you probably want them published under the name 2.10.4.

In that scenario, entering 2.10.4 as the version and leaving the display name blank will build the docs for Prefect 2.10.4 and publish them as 2.10.4 - exactly what you want.

However, you may occasionally want to publish a docs version under an alias. For example, it might be better to combine the docs for older release series under a single name to keep the length of the version selector box manageable.

So, if you know that the docs for 2.6.12 are useful for the entire series of 2.6 releases, you might decide to build the docs for 2.6.12 but publish them as 2.6.x.

Merging and deploying manual builds

When a manual docs build completes, the build action will create a pull request that must be reviewed by a human and merged into the main branch.

An updated copy of the website is deployed to Netlify every time a merge to main occurs and the updated docs usually appear at https://docs.prefect.io in under a minute.

Automated docs builds

Automated docs builds run in response specific changes to in the Prefect repository.

The events in the Prefect repo that trigger a versioned docs build in this repository are:

• A new release is published
• A change to the docs directory is merged to main
• A change to netlify.toml is merged to main

Merging and deploying automated builds

Automated builds create auto-merge pull requests, so no human intervention should be required unless something goes wrong.

If the docs site isn't updating in response to changes that should trigger a new build, check the list of recent build workflow runs for build failures.

unreleased docs version

The versioned docs currently show an unreleased version in the version selector. This version includes the latest docs changes from the main branch of the prefect repository.

To hide the unreleased docs, do the following:

• Change HIDE_UNRELEASED_VERSION to True in sort-docs-versions.py.
• Delete the unreleased version from versions/versions.json.
• Push the changes to the main branch of this repository.