Adding new docs or new branches

The documentation that appears on the http://www.elastic.co/guide website is controlled by the conf.yaml file in the docs repo.

You can add a new repository under the repos section, if it doesn’t already exist, and you can add a new "book" under the contents section.

Each book contains a list of branches and we build a separate copy of each book for each of those branches. There is also a current branch which gets special treatment. When we fork a branch like 7.x or 7.9 we typically add it to the list of branches so we immediately start building docs for it while we’re actively developing against it. When we release a new minor or major version we update the current branch to point to that branch.

Each book may optionally contain a list of live branches. If the list is specified only branches that are in it are considered "living" and books that are not in the list will get a message at the top of each page saying that we don’t plan to release any more bug fixes or actively maintain the docs for that branch.

If you want a branch to have a different "version" name (for instance, if you want to build a version called "4.2" but have it build out of a branch called "branch-for-4.2"), you can put {branch-for-4.2: 4.2} as an entry in the branches list. Everywhere else in conf.yaml, continue to use branch-for-4.2.