Dynamic per-user documentation sites with external Markdown sources (database/S3).

[zdunecki]

User feedback:

Q:

1, Was trying to figure out how to achieve below using xyd docs.

Suppose my Markdown files are stored externally—say in a database or on S3 via my CMS. For each user, I want to dynamically spin up a dedicated docs website, similar to how Notion creates a workspace per user.
What’s the recommended approach to achieve this with XYD Docs?

2. I’d love to contribute to XYD. Please let me know how I can get involved and help the community.

A:

1. Woah, nice use case. As it's not possible to make this very well right now I mean no clean API and with a good Developer Experience but I see how you can achieve that a bit tricky but should work.

a) Separate builds for each user.
You'll use xyd build for each user, so you need to manage multiple docs.json and builds separately. You'll need a script to get data from s3/database and push that into docs.json.

You can also do that only when needed I mean separate scripts for such build but normally manage shared content without user-specific build (most useful for dev mode).

Pros:
- content security by separated build
Cons:
- you need to manage multiple xyd builds



b) One build with proxy.
You can get data from s3/database once for all users and move them to separate folders and modify docs.json to good read that.

This will require also some scripts as a post process (bash scripts or dedicated code in node.j or golang for example) to make a good copy of index.html and other stuff to put that behind a server like nginx. It's all needed to make a content protected

Pros:
- one xyd build
Cons:
- you need some tricks to make content secure (probably some copying file + nginx-like server)


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As you see it's a bit tricky but should work.

Nevertheless your use case is really interesting and I think we should look into this in the future because xyd was designed to make such as things in the future.
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2. Technically it needs some research and make decision how to design API to make this work:

Inside xyd engine we have a mechanism called virtual files. Thanks to that we can for example get OpenAPI/GraphQL definitions and write files at build time so it's not needed to save files physically (and push to GitHub). This mechanism will needed refactor cuz it's not comfortable to use yet.

We'll need a multi tenant mechanism, one interface to make virtual builds and final output for separated serving without tricky scripts (1a/1b).

(v1/v2) We also need a security mechanism per tenant. Will require enable server rendering (we use remix) and use virtual builds inteface (above checkpoint) 

(optional) Another source mechanism like OpenAPI/GraphQL but designed for s3/database. This will require refactor source mechanism or for MVP just another source.

Nevertheless, thanks for interesting in contribution! As you can see it may require a bit of work to accomplish this well but if you're interested I can assist you.

I think sooner or later we'll make this real in xyd but I can't say when. We make contribution in spare time because it's not our main product.


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You can also check out a tricky solution (1a/1b) if you think contribution does not suite for you.