Accessing previous docs versions

This documentation website only covers the latest stable release of Meilisearch. However, it is possible to view the documentation of previous Meilisearch versions stored in our GitHub repository.

This guide shows you how to clone Meilisearch's documentation repository, fetch the content for a specific version, and read it on your local machine.

To follow this guide, you should have some familiarity with the command line. Before beginning, make sure the following tools are installed on your machine:

• Git
• Node v14
• Yarn
• Python 3

To access previous versions of the Meilisearch documentation, the first step is downloading the documentation repository into your local machine. In Git, this is referred to as cloning.

Open your console and run the following command. It will create a documentation directory in your current location containing the Meilisearch documentation site project files:

git clone https://github.com/meilisearch/documentation.git

Alternatively, you may clone the repository using an SSH URL.

The documentation repository contains tags for versions from v0.8 up to the latest release. Use these tags together with git checkout to access a specific version.

For example, the following command retrieves the Meilisearch v0.20 documentation:

git checkout v0.20

Visit the repository on GitHub to view all documentation tags.

There are different ways of accessing the documentation of previous Meilisearch releases depending on the version you checked out.

Starting with v1.2, Meilisearch's documentation content and build code live in separate repositories. Because of this, it is not possible to run a local copy of the documentation website.

To access the Meilisearch documentation for versions 1.2 and later, read the .mdx files directly, either locally with the help of a modern text editor or remotely using GitHub's interface.

This version of the Meilisearch documentation manages its dependencies with Yarn. Run the following command to install all required packages:

yarn install

After installing dependencies, use Yarn to start the server:

yarn dev

Yarn will build the website from the markdown source files. Once the server is online, use your browser to navigate to http://localhost:8080.

Accessing Meilisearch documentation from v0.11 to v0.16 requires launching an HTTP server on your local machine. Run the following command on your console:

python3 -m http.server 8080

Once the server is online, use your browser to navigate to http://localhost:8080.

The above example uses Python to launch a local server, but alternatives such as npx serve work equally well.

The build workflow on early versions of the documentation website involves multiple deprecated tools and libraries. Browse the source markdown files, either locally with the help of a modern text editor or remotely using GitHub's interface.