Self-hosting (early)

Early

Self-hosting is early. It works, but it hasn't had much use outside Markdrop yet, there's no published image (you build it from the repository), and its commands may still change. Markdrop Guides itself, at markdrop.in, is the supported way to run a guide.

The engine that builds guides and docs.markdrop.in lives in the Markdrop repository under docs-platform/, with the renderer in frontend/. It's MIT-licensed. It takes a content folder and turns it into a static site: pages, a Markdown copy of each, search, link-preview images, llms.txt and the /mcp server. Then it serves that site, on one machine.

What a content folder looks like

my-guide/

my-guide/
├── site.json                 the guide's name, sidebar, theme and brand
├── guide/
│   ├── start.md              one Markdown file per page
│   └── publish.md
├── public/docs-assets/       images and files the pages use
└── redirects.json            old addresses → new ones (optional)

site.json

{
  "id": "example",
  "name": "Example Guide",
  "description": "A two-page guide that shows the shape of a content folder.",
  "url": "http://localhost:8080",
  "tabs": [],
  "nav": [
    { "group": "Guide", "icon": "home", "pages": ["/guide/start", "/guide/publish"] }
  ]
}

Pages are Markdown with a front matter block (title, description, updated), in the same format as Markdrop Guides' Markdown mode: callouts, steps, tabs, cards and code blocks work the same. site.json also takes a theme with the six presets, fonts, corners, colour mode and custom CSS. docs-platform/examples/minimal is a complete two-page example.

Run it with Docker

From a clone of the repository:

bash

docker build -f docs-platform/docker/Dockerfile -t markdrop-guides .
docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 \
  -v "$PWD/my-guide:/site:ro" \
  -v markdrop-guides-data:/data \
  markdrop-guides

Open http://localhost:8080. The container builds the folder mounted at /site and serves it. When a file changes it rebuilds, and switches to the new build only once it's complete; if a build fails, it keeps serving the last good one. Keep /data on a volume so rebuilds only redo what changed. The image includes the engine's dependencies, so it's large (around 1 GB).

Run it with Node

You need Node 22 and the repository's dependencies installed in both frontend/ and docs-platform/ (npm ci in each).

bash

cd docs-platform
node builder/cli.mjs bundle
node server/server.mjs start --content ../my-guide --data /tmp/my-guide-data --port 8080 --watch

What's different from Markdrop Guides

No editor, roles or reviews. You edit the files; your Git workflow is your review.
Ask AI needs Markdrop's backend. Leave it off in site.json.
Page feedback needs a URL of your own to receive it.
No password or members-only access. Put the server behind your own sign-in if you need that.
One build at a time per data folder.

Want the Markdown in Git and the Markdrop Guides editor? That's GitHub sync, which is coming soon.