Documentation for ASF Search applications is built using MkDocs, mkdocs.org.
MkDocs comes with a built-in dev-server that lets you preview
your documentation as you work on it. Make sure you're in the
same directory as the mkdocs.yml configuration file, and then
start the server by running the mkdocs serve command:
$ mkdocs serve
INFO - Building documentation...
INFO - Cleaning site directory
[I 160402 15:50:43 server:271] Serving on http://127.0.0.1:8000
[I 160402 15:50:43 handlers:58] Start watching changes
[I 160402 15:50:43 handlers:60] Start detecting changes
Open up http://127.0.0.1:8000/ in your browser, and you'll see the
default home page for the documentation.
mkdocs build --clean
This command will build documentation as an html website within the 'site' directory.
After some time, files may be removed from the documentation but they will still reside in the site directory. That is why the --clean switch is used. It will erase the old files from the site directory.
The .gitignore file lists the MkDocs site directory so the generated site files are not stored in the repository. The site directory should be built dynamically as part of the merge process in github.
Merge to the branches: prod, test, and dev triggers an appropriate AWS CodeBuild process creating the site in an S3 bucket. The S3 bucket is then accessible via CloudFront. Since CloudFront doesn't automatically redirect to index.html when supplied with a path, a Lambda function handles the redirect.