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MkDocs

A fast static site generator for project documentation.

MkDocs is a fast static site generator for project documentation. It builds a site from Markdown content plus a single mkdocs.yml configuration file, with theme, navigation, and plugin choices specified in the config. The default mkdocs.yml is a few lines; adding pages, custom themes, and plugins layers on more.

The Material for MkDocs theme by Martin Donath has become the de facto standard for technical documentation. It provides built-in search, dark mode, code annotations, admonitions, content tabs, and many other documentation-friendly features that the bare MkDocs default theme does not. A substantial fraction of new project documentation sites in 2024-2025 are MkDocs Material.

MkDocs (originally by Tom Christie) has been around since 2014 and is BSD-licensed. The project ecosystem includes plugins for versioning, search index optimisation, redirects, includes, and many other documentation niceties. Many large open-source projects (FastAPI, Pydantic, htmx, Anthropic's docs at one stage) use MkDocs Material as their docs platform.

pip install mkdocs
With Material:
  pip install mkdocs-material