How to serve Retype at www.my-site.com/docs/

[RoryGraman]

Hello!

I have a react app for an ongoing project that will be hosted at https://conveyor.finance. There is already a landing page set at the home directory, and an an additional page hosted at '/app/.

I really like the interface of Retype, and want to use it for the documentation of our site, and want to set it up where it is served at https://conveyor.finance/docs/.

All the markdown files will be stored in the project (not served from github pages), but I'm having difficulty having it serve from the /docs/ URL when running a local version of the site.

Expected results: When running yarn start from the root directory, the website should render at localhost:3000 and localhost:3000/app, which is already happening, but it should also render Retype at localhost:3000/docs. I've tried updating the port, but no joy on having everything render/export correctly

I have a 'docs' folder in the root directory of my project, and it does currently serve using retype watch at localhost:5000/docs

current structure

| build
| public
| src
| docs (retype)
retype.yml

retype.yml

input: ./docs/
output: .retype
url: https://conveyor.finance
branding:
  title: ConveyorFinance
  label: Docs
links:
- text: Getting Started
  link: https://retype.com/guides/getting-started/
footer:
  copyright: "© Copyright {{ year }} - [Conveyor Labs](https://conveyorlabs.org). All rights reserved."

any help would be appreciated!

[geoffreymcgill]

Hi. Likely a couple issues happening.

First, the input source .md files should be in a different location than where you want the generated Retype site to be placed. If your .md files are in ./docs/ and you want the new generated website to be placed in the ./docs/ folder, then you should move your .md files to a different location, such as ./docs-src/ or ./src/.

You would then update your retype.yml file with that new input location. For example:

input: ./src/

Then you will want to output to the ./docs/ folder. For example:

output: ./docs/

I think that should work.
Hope this helps.

[RoryGraman]

Right, but the issue is that it's creating an additional index.html file in addition to my primary sites' index.html, which is not resolving my-site.com/docs/ to Retype. is there something I need to explicitly add in app.js or public/index.html so that Retype will resolve at that URL once its hosted at my-site.com?

[geoffreymcgill]

Is that "primary site" index.html at ./index.html or ./docs/index.html?

Because if you have output: ./docs configured for your Retype project, then Retype will generate a ./docs/index.html file.

If you do not want Retype to generate a ./docs/index.html file, then add your own custom index.html file into the root of your src content folder (where you keep your .md files) and remove any readme.md, index.md, or default.md files from the root of your content src.

Any app.js or public/index.html are out of the scope of Retype.

Hope this helps.

[RoryGraman]

I would need retype to generate an index.html, because anytime I update the md files, it adds that information to the index.html file that retype generates.

the problem is that even if I have both my app project and retype exporting index.html to the same folder, one overwrites the other. If I prevent retype from writing an index.html, none of the data that I've added to the MD files will populate on the site that's served

[RoryGraman]

to answer your question though, my primary sites index.html is customized at /public/, and upon doing yarn build, it copies to the /build directory

[RoryGraman]

what i would need is for Retype to append additional data onto the index.html before writing to /build. this way, any new data that is populated into Retype is served once the site is deployed

[geoffreymcgill]

This is not an action Retype can currently perform. You can add .html files into your Retype project and they will be copied to the output location, but Retype explicitly does not touch or modify any files that are outside of the input location.

[geoffreymcgill]

Try setting the following in your retype.yml config file.

input: ./docs
output: ./public/docs
url: https://conveyor.finance/docs

That should read the .md files from your ./docs/ folder and then output the generated website into the ./public/docs/ folder. Maybe the retype build call would need to happen after your other build processes are complete.