[email protected] 🚀 (The Universal Engine Update)

[mgks]

Date: January 10, 2026
Repository: github.com/docmd-io/docmd
Website: docmd.io

This release marks a pivotal moment in the project's history. We have migrated to a dedicated organization, slashed the package size by over 90%, and completely rewrote the internal engine to be faster, leaner, and more stable.

🏠 New Home, New Identity

We have graduated from a personal project to a dedicated organization.

• Source Code: Moved to docmd-io/docmd.
• Documentation: Now live at docs.docmd.io.
• Live Editor: Now hosted at live.docmd.io.
• Website: Check out the new landing page at docmd.io.

📉 The "Codebase Surgery" (90% Smaller)

We went on a strict diet. By removing heavy dependencies and optimizing our build strategy, docmd is now lighter than ever.

• Removed express: Replaced the Dev Server with a lightweight, native Node.js HTTP server.
• Removed fs-extra: Replaced with native Node.js fs/promises and custom lightweight utils.
• Removed clean-css: Switched to esbuild for lightning-fast CSS/JS minification.
• CDN Strategy: We no longer bundle the massive mermaid.js and minisearch libraries inside the CLI. These are now loaded via CDN at runtime, reducing the install size from ~5.7MB to ~500KB.
• Static Scripts Compression: All static assets are pre-optimized and get compressed on each build and live up to 20-30%, except dev to give developers space to live edit scripts.
• Asset Trimming: Removed images from static assets and compressed existing ones to almost 50-70%.
• In-house Dependency: After removing some of the heavy dependencies we got rid of additional 200+ dependencies completely unusable to us, instead we replaced them with our in-house scripts.

✨ New Features

⚡ Smart Dev Server

No more crashing if Port 3000 is busy.

• Interactive Port Selection: If the default port is taken, docmd dev will politely ask to spawn on the next available port.
• Fail-Safe Sockets: Fixed a race condition where the Live Reload socket tried to connect before the server was ready.

🛠️ Programmatic API

docmd is no longer just a CLI. You can now import the core engine into your own Node.js scripts.

const { build } = require('@mgks/docmd');

// Build your docs programmatically
await build('./docmd.config.js', { 
  isDev: false, 
  preserve: true 
});

🧠 Smarter init

• Auto-Package: docmd init now detects if package.json is missing and generates one for you, making new projects deployment-ready instantly.
• Better Templates: The default generated files now feature a beautiful "Welcome" page demonstrating Callouts, Tabs, and Cards.

🧰 More In-house Scripts

Instead of depending on some of the heaviest dependencies, we are using our own micro scripts, making docmd much lighter and faster now.

• fs-utils: Handles docmd file-management with combination of native Node.js wrappers and in-house utils, replacing fs-extra.
• html-formatter: Handles HTML cleanup and compression without depending on any dedicated packages.

🐛 Bug Fixes & Improvements

• Asset Management: Created a universal asset manager that handles recursive copying, minification, and branding headers for all CSS/JS output.
• Live Editor: Rewrote the builder to use Virtual Modules for templates, eliminating the need for hardcoded templates.js files in the source.
• Windows Support: Improved path normalization in the new native static server.
• SEO: Fixed indentation issues in generated HTML meta tags.
• TOC View: Fixed incorrect overflow for mobile devices with toc contents not completely visible.

🔮 What's Cooking? (Roadmap to v0.4.0)

We are currently working on the Modular Architecture update.

1. Monorepo Migration: Moving to PNPM workspaces to separate @docmd/core, @docmd/cli, and @docmd/theme-default.
2. Plugin Architecture: We are designing a hooks system to allow community plugins to inject logic into the build process (e.g., Tailwind support, custom SEO logic).
3. Auto-Sidebar: A new feature to automatically generate sidebar navigation based on your folder structure.
4. Themes Kit: Decoupling themes so they can be installed separately or created by the community.

📥 Install

npm install -g @mgks/docmd@latest

Full Changelog: 0.3.7...0.3.8

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This discussion was created from the release [email protected] 🚀 (The Universal Engine Update).