Today we are extremely happy to finally announce Docusaurus 2.0! ๐ฅณ๏ธ
At Meta Open Source, we believe Docusaurus will help you build the best documentation websites with minimal effort, letting you focus on what really matters: writing the content.
After 4 years of work, 75 alphas and 22 betas, the next generation of Docusaurus is ready for prime time. From now on, we now plan to respect Semantic Versioning and will release major versions more frequently.
In a hurry? Check what's new in Docusaurus 2.0!
What is Docusaurus exactly?โ
Docusaurus is a static site generator that helps you ship beautiful documentation websites in no time.
Focus on your content: just write Markdown files. Docusaurus will generate an optimized website for you that's easy to host anywhere.
Docusaurus is full-featured and very flexible: we ship with well-designed docs and blog layout, as well as out-of-the-box versioning, search, and internationalization functionalities, with a call to accessibility and search engine optimizations. Its flexible theming system permits to adapt the UI to match your branding so that it integrates nicely with your main website or documentation portal. Its usage of React enables a modern client-side navigation, and the ability to build an interactive documentation.
The Docusaurus philosophy is akin to the Pareto principle: you can get 80% of the results for 20% of the effort. This enables you to compete with top-notch documentation sites with minimal effort.
Unless you're spinning up a documentation team with engineering resources, you probably want Docusaurus!
Docusaurus aims to be the best documentation tool, but you can use it for other use-cases as well: a blog, a knowledge base, a developer portfolio, a second brain, or even to scaffold landing pages!
Using Docusaurus for my tech blog has been a fantastic choice. It looks tremendous out-of-the-box and the awesome DX means I write way more
Try Docusaurus now with our online playgrounds and 5 minutes tutorial โฑ๏ธ
The story behind Docusaurusโ
Docusaurus was created at Facebook Open Source in 2017 (now Meta Open Source). We had a lot of internal and open source projects to document. It's complicated enough to write good documentation, let alone to create the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for a good-looking website. We wanted project leaders to be able to focus on the content, and Markdown is great for that.
At that time, our solution was to copy/paste a Jekyll template over and over again. This naturally became hard to maintain, so we created a tool to solve our own pain once for all.
It quickly built momentum at Facebook and in the frontend ecosystem, adopted by many popular projects such as Prettier, Babel, React-Native, KaTeX, and of course Docusaurus v1 itself.
Notice that the sample sites above use different colors, but still look quite the same.
Toward Docusaurus 2.0โ
Docusaurus v1 has been very successful, but we started to question some architectural choices:
- React was only used as a server-side templating language, and not used on the client
- Theming system was pretty limited, and apart from changing a few colors with CSS, it was difficult to do more advanced customizations
- The docs versioning system was confusing, since it was based on a diff algorithm
- The codebase was monolithic, neither well-tested nor easy to extend
Docusaurus v2 was rebuilt from the ground up with a new modular architecture:
- React is now also used on the client, enabling a modern Single Page Application navigation
- Plugins empower the community to contribute useful features as third-party packages
- Theming is more flexible than ever
- Docs versioning is now based on snapshot copies, much easier to understand
- We kept everything good from v1: docs, blog, pages, versioning, i18n...
- We implemented several new features
More details in the Docusaurus 2 project announcement and v1 to v2 migration guide
Who uses Docusaurus 2.0?โ
Despite being in pre-release, it didn't take long for Docusaurus v2 to outgrow Docusaurus v1 in terms of NPM downloads:
Our GitHub star trend is very positive, competing with major frameworks:
Today, Docusaurus v2 has already been a great success even before its launch:
- We received so many lovely testimonials
- Companies like 1Password and Courier are writing down their positive experience
- Our site showcase references hundreds of sites, and this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Please add your site to our site showcase! It only takes a few seconds: just post a comment here.
We use Docusaurus everywhere now and love it
We've been using V2 since January and it has been great
Docusaurus is next level easy for literally everything you would need for documentation in your project.
Docusaurus is awesome. We use it
What's New in 2.0?โ
It would be difficult to describe every single new feature coming with Docusaurus v2. Let's focus on the features we believe are the most impactful.
MDXโ
MDX allows you to interleave React components in Markdown. This enables you to build top-notch interactive documentation experiences very easily.
A demo is worth a thousand words:
### Give it a try: press that button!
import ColorModeToggle from '@theme/ColorModeToggle';
<ColorModeToggle/>
Give it a try: press that button!
MDX has its own plugin system. You to customize your Markdown authoring experience, and even create your own Markdown syntax.
Docusaurus + MDX is great: we were able to implement a beautiful two-pane layout and give the author fine-grained control on the placement of code and corresponding prose.
File system conventionsโ
Our goal is to make Docusaurus very intuitive to use. We added file system conventions, and adding a doc page is as easy as creating one Markdown file.
Using the auto-generated sidebars makes it so simple to just create a page and not worry about any other configuration.
Pluginsโ
Docusaurus now has a modular architecture with a plugin system โ our core features like docs, blog, pages, and search are all powered by individual plugins.
More importantly, it enables our community to enhance Docusaurus with additional features.
Let's highlight some examples:
- redocusaurus: seamless integration with OpenAPI and Redoc
- docusaurus-preset-shiki-twoslash: use Shiki code block syntax highlighting with TwoSlash TypeScript compiler hints
The plugin API was a breeze to use, and powerful enough that I could port the code sample renderer from the TypeScript website site in a couple of hours.
- docusaurus-search-local: one of the various local search alternatives to the built-in Algolia plugin
We have a curated list of outstanding plugins in our community resources page.
The plugin system in Docusaurus v2 has made expanding 1Password's developer portal so easy and fun. Super excited to show you what we've got cooking up.
Themingโ
Theming is one of the most important features of Docusaurus: we believe a professional documentation site should respect your company's branding and create a consistent experience.
Docusaurus theming gives a lot of flexibility on multiple levels:
- Customize CSS variables to adjust colors, fonts, and more
- Provide your own CSS stylesheets
- Implement your own theme from scratch
- Override any React component provided by our default theme: we call this swizzling
I love Docusaurus Swizzling feature. Itโs opinionated and flexible at the same time. This is super cool since a framework usually needs to sacrifice one for the other.
This enables users willing to invest a bit more time on customizations to build sites that look different from others.