Only display tags on serve

[rachel-rigdon-sp]

Hi! I am just now beginning to use tags, so I might be missing something, but my goal is:

• have tags visible on serve
• have tags: false on build - enabled but never rendered

I think I'm essentially asking to treat all tags as shadow tags without needing special notation.

Is there a way to do this with the current settings? I'm also exploring if I can set tags: false during my build/deploy process.

[mocdaniel]

Hi :)

Yes, this is doable. mkdocs supports environment variables for config values, so you can do something like this:

plugins:
  - tags:
      tags: !ENV [SHOW_TAGS,false]

and invoke mkdocs serve like this:

SHOW_TAGS=true mkdocs serve

This way, tags won't be rendered unless you explicitly define SHOW_TAGS (e.g. when serving it locally or you want to build your site with tags), but will still be be extracted from all pages, e.g. for exporting them.

[rachel-rigdon-sp]

@mocdaniel Thank you! That's super helpful.

It does make me realize that I worded my question backwards - my goal is more to suppress tags upon building so that running just mkdocs serve would always render tags, but running mkdocs build would strip them out.

Would the same principle apply where I'd run something like SHOW_TAGS=false mkdocs build?

[mocdaniel]

Exactly :) just make sure to flip the default in your mkdocs.yaml from false to true, then pass the env variable in your build scenario as you outlined already.

That way, tags will always shop up when your site is served directly by mkdocs, but won't be displayed when the site's build is being served (e.g. by a web server in production).

[rachel-rigdon-sp]

@mocdaniel Thank you so much! I just tested and validated that works!