RW

A documentation engine with no build step. Point it at a directory of markdown files and start serving — pages are rendered when requested, not ahead of time. One file changed? Only that page is re-rendered. Your site can have 10 pages or 10,000; startup time is the same.

Publish the same markdown to Confluence pages or build static sites for Backstage TechDocs.

Features

• CommonMark — standard markdown via pulldown-cmark
• Live reload — edit markdown, see changes instantly in the browser
• Diagram rendering — PlantUML, Mermaid, GraphViz, and 14+ formats via Kroki
• Tabbed content — group related content with :::tab syntax
• GitHub-style alerts — [!NOTE], [!TIP], [!WARNING], and more
• Navigation and TOC — automatic sidebar, breadcrumbs, and table of contents
• Page metadata — YAML sidecar files for titles, descriptions, and custom variables
• Confluence publishing — update pages via REST API with OAuth authentication
• TechDocs output — build static sites compatible with Backstage

Quickstart

# macOS (Homebrew)
brew install rwdocs/tap/rw

# macOS / Linux (shell)
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/rwdocs/rw/releases/latest/download/rw-installer.sh | sh

# Windows (PowerShell)
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -c "irm https://github.com/rwdocs/rw/releases/latest/download/rw-installer.ps1 | iex"

Then serve your docs:

rw serve

RW looks for markdown files in docs/ by default. If docs/ has no index.md, the project root README.md is used as the homepage.

Open http://localhost:7979 to see your site.

Configuration

RW uses rw.toml for configuration, automatically discovered in the current directory or any parent directory.

[docs]
source_dir = "docs"

[diagrams]
kroki_url = "https://kroki.io"

[confluence]
base_url = "${CONFLUENCE_URL}"
access_token = "${CONFLUENCE_TOKEN}"
access_secret = "${CONFLUENCE_SECRET}"

See the configuration guide for all options.

Commands

Command	Description
rw serve	Start documentation server with live reload
rw backstage publish	Publish documentation bundles to S3 for Backstage
rw confluence update	Publish markdown to a Confluence page
rw confluence generate-tokens	Generate OAuth access tokens
rw techdocs build	Build a static site for Backstage TechDocs
rw techdocs publish	Upload static site to S3

Documentation

• Configuration
• Page Metadata
• Confluence Publishing
• TechDocs
• Diagram Rendering