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Cover image for Doctave.com opens to public beta
Nik Begley for Doctave

Posted on • Originally published at blog.doctave.com

Doctave.com opens to public beta

We are excited to announce that Doctave.com is now in public beta. Doctave.com is the best place to host your docs-as-code documentation, and it’s available for everyone starting today.

What is Doctave.com?

At the end of last year we created Doctave, a batteries-included static site generator. But there are many features that a documentation site generator cannot provide that are important for larger teams. If you have 50 different repositories, you would end up with 50 disconnected documentation websites to manage and configure. No standardization, nothing to link the docs together.

Today we are making available Doctave.com to solve these issues, making it the best place to host your technical documentation.

By using Doctave.com for your documentation you get:

  • A private space for all your organization’s documentation
  • Visual diffs of changes
  • GitHub Pull-Request integration
  • Search across all projects at once
  • Option for public-facing documentation

And most importantly: no lock-in. Your docs are just Markdown files in your Git repository, rendered by Doctave.com.

Let’s take a look at some of these features closer.

Visual diffs

One piece of feedback we heard many times was that it was hard to see what actually changed in the documentation looking at a raw Git diff. People wanted to see a visual diff of the documentation rendered normally.

So we built it.

visual diff preview

This is a preview of changes for our public-facing documentation. For each pull request you can see exactly what changed, rendered on Doctave.com.

GitHub integration

For many software engineering teams a lot of our work happens on GitHub. This is why it was important for us to make sure Doctave.com works well with Pull Requests. When you push your documentation to Doctave.com, we annotate your commits with links to preview your updated docs.

doctave github integration example

Your documentation deserves the same attention as your tests, and Doctave.com helps you to never forget to update the docs.

We’re just getting started

We have a long list of features we are excited to build to make writing and maintaining quality documentation even easier. Here’s a quick sneak preview of things we are planning:

  • Documentation linters that verify your docs on every push
  • Analytics to help you see what docs people are reading
  • Feedback mechanisms to help improve your documentation

And much more…

Want to try it out?

Sign up for a free trial here. No credit card required. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at nik@doctave.com.

Happy documenting!

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