Starlight vs. Docusaurus for building documentation

1

Vercel

Docusaurus supports simple deployment on platforms like Vercel and Netlify, Vercel being the recommended option. For deploying on Vercel, we just need to import the GitHub repository of our Docusaurus site to Vercel and it will take care of the rest. We can deploy with the default options selected: An additional benefit of deploying this way is that we get the latest production deployment to run whenever we push to the main branch of the imported GitHub repository.

#Developer Tools #Web Development Tools #App Deployment 522 social mentions

2

Mermaid

We can also create diagrams inside of our documentation using mermaid.js. Upon installing and enabling the Mermaid plugin, any code block with the language set to mermaid will be rendered as a diagram.

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3

Jekyll

In that case, what we need would be closer to a static site generator (like Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll). But, static site generators aren't the best choice either because we would have to build a lot of documentation-focused functionality (like versioning, search, and code blocks) ourselves.

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4

Apache HTTP Server

Both Docusaurus and Starlight generate static sites. This means that theoretically, they can be deployed on any platform that supports deploying static sites (like Apache or NGINX). But both of them provide a significantly better developer experience if we deploy on their recommended platforms.

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5

Hugo

In that case, what we need would be closer to a static site generator (like Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll). But, static site generators aren't the best choice either because we would have to build a lot of documentation-focused functionality (like versioning, search, and code blocks) ourselves.

#Static Site Generators #Blogging #Blogging Platform 353 social mentions

6

Docusaurus

Created by Facebook, Docusaurus is an open source static site generator built on top of React. Docusaurus is also used by several platforms like Redux, Ionic, Supabase, etc. To host their documentation. They recently released version 3.0 of the framework. The generator provides documentation-centric features like MDX support, versioning, translation, search, and loads of customization options.

#Documentation #Documentation As A Service & Tools #Static Site Generators 192 social mentions

7

Astro Build

Starlight is a static site generator built on top of Astro. It is also open source but not as feature-rich as Docusaurus because it is still in beta. Regardless, it still provides features like MXD support, navigation, search, code blocks, etc. One advantage of being built on top of Astro is that custom components can be written in our favorite frameworks like Svelte, Vue, and Solid in addition to React.

#Website Builder #Blogging #Blogging Platform 177 social mentions