Is there a way to copy raw static files into the generated site?

[mikehearn]

I'd like to include non-mkdocs generated HTML into my static site, so I can include JavaDocs and the like. There doesn't appear to be any way to do this as far as I can tell so far, other than editing the site dir after generation. But the gh-deploy command is indeed, so useful, that I'd really like to have mkdocs understand this pattern so I don't have to do the deploy manually.

[waylan]

Any non-Markdown files included in the docs_dir are copied as-is. Simply include the files in your docs_dir and they will be copied over.

If you would like to do anything outside of that, a plugin would address those needs. Personally, I'm surprised I don't see one listed on the wiki that does this already.

[mikehearn]

Ah, I'm an idiot. It does work. Sorry. I think I was getting confused because I expected mkdocs serve to rebuild the site in the site directory, as it talks about cleaning the site directory and building the docs when it starts up. I looked inside it and didn't see my files being copied across, and I'd made a mistake in the URL I was opening so got a 404. Together these two things confused me. But experimenting more, I see that mkdocs serve must be using an in-memory site build or putting it somewhere else, as the site directory doesn't actually get created at all.

[waylan]

Yes, the serve command creates a temporary directory and does not use the site dir.