Documentation Pages

The Nominatim documentation is built using the MkDocs static site generation framework. The master branch is automatically deployed every night on under https://nominatim.org/release-docs/develop/

To preview local changes, first install MkDocs

pip3 install --user mkdocs

If mkdocs can't be found after the installation, the $PATH might have not been set correctly yet. Try opening a new terminal session.

Then go to the build directory and run

make doc
INFO - Cleaning site directory
INFO - Building documentation to directory: /home/vagrant/build/site-html

This runs mkdocs build plus extra transformation of some files and adds symlinks (see CMakeLists.txt for the exact steps).

Now you can start webserver for local testing

build> mkdocs serve
[server:296] Serving on http://127.0.0.1:8000
[handlers:62] Start watching changes

If you develop inside a Vagrant virtual machine:

  • add port forwarding to your Vagrantfile, e.g. config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 8000, host: 8000
  • use mkdocs serve --dev-addr 0.0.0.0:8000 because the default localhost IP does not get forwarded.