Check out our awesome new docs site

At the end of February, we launched a new docs site!

This one's a bit different from what we had before. Rather than building our own sites and publishing toolchain, we're partnering with a new provider to handle the infrastructure and UX support. We’ve also combined our product and API docs into one site, and made some other under-the-hood improvements I’ll talk about below.

So why did we do this?

In the great “build vs. buy” debate, LaunchDarkly has always had a strong opinion, but you might be surprised to learn we didn’t adhere to it where our docs are concerned until recently. Back in 2019, we built our docs site from scratch and spent 4-ish years happily generating static sites with Gatsby and Node, but when the tools and frameworks we were using started to fall out of support, we knew it was time for a change.  

LaunchDarkly’s docs and API docs get some of the highest traffic of any of our online properties, so it makes sense to give them a first-class tool to run on.

We had some specific considerations when we evaluated new platforms for our docs sites:

• We needed all the functionality of the existing site, including the docs-as-code writing and publishing process that has become an industry standard in developer-facing SaaS companies.
• We had to keep the automated review steps (including URL validation and Playwright screenshot tests) that run every time we commit changes in Git.
• We wanted a sleek, performant new UI that was more aligned with LaunchDarkly’s brand.
• We wanted to find a product that would handle building and running the site itself, with a dedicated team on call to take our feedback and requests for new features.

Enter Fern.

Fern gives us the benefits of buying a service to host and publish our docs, rather than having to build and maintain our own. It's a win-win-win: by handing the infrastructure and design support for our docs sites to Fern, the docs team is able to focus on writing the best possible docs, Fern gets to do what they do best, and LaunchDarkly developers can focus on building the product our customers know and love.

What's changed

While the site mostly looks, feels, and runs the same as it did before our migration, you may notice and enjoy some of these usability improvements:

• Updated root URLs: the docs used to be at docs.launchdarkly.com, and apidocs.launchdarkly.com. Now all the docs are in one place: launchdarkly.com/docs.
  This makes finding API docs from the product docs easier, and vice versa. It also enables a tighter relationship between the LaunchDarkly main site and the docs site by sharing the same root URL (and unlocks some analytics and SEO improvements for us).
• Faster page load times.
• Easier code snippet navigation, especially when you switch between the programming languages we support.
• Improved search results and search UX.
• A guided, workflow-driven feedback mechanisms at the bottom of each page (please leave feedback! It makes us feel all warm and fuzzy).

What's next

We're really excited about this change, and looking forward to the future: more collaboration with our teammates in developer relations and Marketing, more frequent feature updates and improvements to the docs site, and more of the best-in-show docs and technical content you've come to expect from our team. We’re already using basic feature flags on our docs, and we look forward to adding more advanced capabilities so we can do advanced targeting, custom docs rollouts, and even experiments on our docs, all using LaunchDarkly.

Thanks for reading!