Offline documentation bundle

Builds the product documentation into a self-contained bundle that ships inside the release tarball at client/_documentation. The Mattermost server serves it at /_documentation, and mattermost docs serves it when the server is not running.

Depends on the egress / self-host changes that keep the built site free of off-origin fetches (fonts, screenshots, OpenAPI icons, video iframes).

Build the bundle

Needs Node and Go (API reference generation).

# One-time: the docs build reads content from a submodule.
git submodule update --init docs/vendor/mattermost-plugin-agents

cd docs/site
npm ci

# BASE_URL is baked into absolute asset paths at build time.
BASE_URL=/_documentation/ npm run build
npm run check:egress

cd ../..
python3 docs/scripts/build-offline-bundle.py docs/site/build /tmp/docs-bundle.tar.gz

build-offline-bundle.py hardlinks byte-identical images, drops sitemaps, and writes a gzip tarball.

Try it

Point the CLI at the unpackaged build (no database, config, or webapp):

cd server
go build -o ./bin/mattermost ./cmd/mattermost
./bin/mattermost docs --dir ../docs/site/build

Without --dir it serves the bundle from a packaged release.

To exercise the server route:

cd server
make client   # only symlinks client/ -> ../webapp/channels/dist
mkdir -p ../webapp/channels/dist
tar -xzf /tmp/docs-bundle.tar.gz -C ../webapp/channels/dist
make run-server ENABLED_DOCKER_SERVICES=postgres

Docs are then at http://localhost:8065/_documentation/.

Extract into the symlink target, not through the symlink: make client only creates the link. The webapp does not need to be built. If you do build it, extract the bundle afterwards (webpack output.clean wipes channels/dist).

Package it into a release

make package DOCS_BUNDLE=/tmp/docs-bundle.tar.gz

The bundle is extracted rather than copied so hardlinks survive. Leaving DOCS_BUNDLE unset skips docs packaging.

Current size

Roughly 198 MB compressed, before image optimisation (GIF→H.264 / WebP) tracked separately.