Mkdocs Snippets Plugin

This plugin allows you to include snippets into your mkdocs documentation.

Features

• Organize your snippets in a way that makes sense for you:
  • Multiple snippets per file thanks to YAML syntax.
  • Snippets are loaded from any (nested) directory inside the configured snippets_dir.
  • Recursively include snippets in snippets!
• Documentation links in snippets are automatically converted to relative links based on the snippet's location.
  • This allows you to link to other documentation pages from your snippets without having to worry about the snippet's location.
  • Also works with mike!
• Snippets preserve the indentation of the snippet call.
  • This allows you to use snippets in lists and code blocks without having to worry about indentation.
• Customizable snippet syntax.

Installation

pip install mkdocs-snippets

pip install mkdocs-exclude (recommended)

Consider adding the plugins to a requirements.txt file alongside other Python dependencies for your project.

Setup

Add the plugin to your mkdocs.yml file: It is recommended to use the mkdocs-exclude plugin to exclude the snippet directory from the documentation build. This will save you from a lot of warnings about files that are not referenced in the nav configuration.

plugins:
  - search
  - exclude:
      glob:
        - snippets/*
  - snippets

Usage

The plugin will load snippets from the default directory snippets which must be inside your documentation directory. It is allowed to have any amount of files and subdirectories inside the snippet directory.

These files must be in the YAML format.

mySnippet: |- 
    This is a snippet.
    It can contain multiple lines.

# |- is the YAML Multiline Indicator
myOtherSnippet: |-
    This is another snippet. 

All top level keys in the snippet file are treated as snippets. Every key is a snippet ID.

Snippet Syntax

The default snippet syntax is @Snippet:snippetFile:snippetID@.

Links in Snippets

Internal documentation links in snippets are automatically converted to relative links based on where the snippet is used. This allows you to use documentation links in your snippets without having to worry that the snippet might be used in a directory in which the link does not work. Therefore, links in the snippet must be written as if they were in the root of the documentation directory.

Example

Consider the following documentation structure (docs/ is the documentation's root directory):

docs/API/Overview.md

docs/API/Client/Cookbook.md

A snippet would look like this:

mySnippet: |-
    This is a snippet.
    It contains a link to the [API Overview](API/Overview.md).
myOtherSnippet: |-
    This is another snippet.
    It contains a link to the [Client API Cookbook](API/Client/Cookbook.md).

No leading slashes or relative paths are allowed. The file type (.md) must be specified. The snippets can now be used in any file without the links breaking.

Configuration

If you want to customize the snippet syntax or directory, you can do so by adding the following configuration:

plugins:
  - search
  - snippets:
    directory: "mySnippetDirectory"
    delimiter: "|"
    identifier: "snip"
    divider_char: ">"