Open source from Facebook: website generator Docusaurus 2.0 presented

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open source from facebook website generator docusaurus 20 presented.jpg
open source from facebook website generator docusaurus 20 presented.jpg

Facebook parent company Meta introduces Docusaurus 2.0: A static website generator that helps to create documentation websites.

With the renaming of the parent company, Facebook Open Source has also become Meta Open Source. The company is still heavily involved in the development of open source software in this area. The company repeatedly highlights its projects in the areas of diversity and inclusion, but also regularly provides other open source software.

 

One of these projects is Docusaurus, an infrastructure project that is a static website generator that allows developers to easily create documentation websites.

Docusaurus was created on Facebook back in 2017. The company’s development teams – like many developers – faced the problem of constantly having to document a large number of internal and open source projects. While it is exhausting enough for the development teams to write good documentation for their software, they usually have neither the time nor the inclination to also create the corresponding websites in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

So it was the declared goal to offer them the opportunity to concentrate solely on the content of the documentation. At first, a first solution was to copy and paste a Jekyll template over and over again. This was getting hard to maintain, so the meta developers wrote a new tool, Docusaurus, to better deal with these issues.

According to the meta developers, version 1.0 of the software was already quite successful. However, there were some architectural decisions in this first version that the developers have now questioned. For example, React was only used as a server-side templating language and not on the client. The Ming system was pretty limited and apart from changing a few colors with CSS, it was difficult to do more customization. The document versioning system was confusing as it was based on a diff algorithm. Finally, the code base was monolithic – it wasn’t well tested and it wasn’t easy to extend.

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The development team at Meta rebuilt the software from the ground up with a modular architecture. According to them, this required four years of work and 75 alpha and 22 beta versions. Now React is also used on the client, enabling modern single-page application navigation. Version 2.0 of the software also supports plug-ins, which are intended to enable the community to contribute useful functions as third-party packages.

The theming, which the developers at Meta call one of the most important features of Docusaurus, is more flexible than before. Furthermore, the versioning of the documents is now based on snapshot copies, which should be easier for users to understand. For more details and full details, see Docusaurus 2 project announcement and Version 1 to new Version 2 migration guide.