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Creating a reproduction

A reproduction is a simplified version of a bug that demonstrates the specific scenario in which the bug occurred. It includes all necessary minimal settings and instructions and should be as simple as possible while still demonstrating the issue.

Guide

Environment optional

We recommend using a virtual environment, which is an isolated Python runtime. If you are in a virtual environment, any packages that you install or upgrade will be local to the environment. If you run into problems, you can just delete and recreate the environment. It's trivial to set up:

  • Create a new virtual environment with:

    python3 -m venv venv

  • Activate the environment with:

    . venv/bin/activate

    . venv/Scripts/activate

    . venv/bin/activate

    Your terminal should now print (venv) before the prompt, which is how you know that you are inside the virtual environment that you just created.

  • Exit the environment with:

    deactivate

Minimal reproduction

Following the instructions below, you will set up a skeleton project to create a reproduction. As mentioned above, we recommend using a virtual environment, so create a new folder in your working directory and a new virtual environment inside it. Next:

  1. As mentioned in our bug reporting guide, ensure that you're running the latest version of Material for MkDocs, which might already include a fix for the bug:

    pip install --upgrade --force-reinstall mkdocs-material

  2. Bootstrap a new documentation project using the mkdocs executable, which you use as a basis for the reproduction. It's essential to create a new, empty project for this:

    mkdocs new .

    Start by adding the minimal configuration in mkdocs.yml:

    theme:
  name: material

  3. Now, only add the necessary settings to mkdocs.yml to keep the reproduction minimal. If you are creating a reproduction for a rendering bug, create only the necessary amount of Markdown documents. Repeat this step until the bug you want to report can be observed.

  4. As a last step, before packing everything into a .zip file, double-check all settings and documents if they are essential to the reproduction, which means that the bug does not occur when they are omitted. Remove all non-essential lines and files.

Creating a .zip file

Material for MkDocs 9.0.0 includes a new plugin solely intended to create reproductions for bug reports. When the built-in info plugin is enabled, MkDocs will add all relevant files to a .zip, print a summary to the terminal and exit. Add the following lines to mkdocs.yml:

plugins:
  - info

Now, when running mkdocs build, a file called example.zip is automatically created, containing the minimal reproduction you can directly attach to your bug report.

INFO     -  Started archive creation for bug report
INFO     -  Archive successfully created:

  example/.dependencies.json 859.0 B
  example/.versions.log 83.0 B
  example/docs/index.md 282.0 B
  example/mkdocs.yml 56.0 B

  example.zip 1.8 kB