Show unencrypted content in mkdocs serve

[joapuiib]

I think a enhancement to editors using this plugin would be to be able to see the page content directly without entering a password while serving the site with mkdocs serve.

[unverbuggt]

You can set remember_password: true. This way the user only need to enter his credentials once in a serve session. Initially we had the option to save credentials to local storage, but local storage can be read from anyone who got access to the browser, which is not really secure.

Other way would be to make a copy of the "mkdocs.yml" and disable the plugin in there completely and then run mkdocs serve -f test_mkdocs.yml

[joapuiib]

Yeah. I've thought of remember_password: true, but I don't want to accidentally enable this feature on production.

At the moment, I am just commenting the password in the page.meta section. Again, there's a risk I forget to set it back.

I'd like to be able to see the content in development mode without changing the configuration.

I've thought of:

• Check if we are building/serving the site (on_startup) and save it.
• If we are serving, append the unencrypted content in the template.

I will implement this on my fork, but if you think this is useful to more users, maybe we can discuss how do you want to approach this.

[unverbuggt]

I think when a user does mkdocs serve he wants to have the same result as mkdocs build but with automatic rebuild on change.
That is not 100% accurate, as mkdocs injects some javascript to make the browser auto-reload on change, but nevertheless I wouldn't override the plugin.

If you use two different versions "mkdocs.yml", then you can easily separate development from production.

[joapuiib]

I get your point. But, if you're mantaining multiple projects, having different mkdocs would increase the efforts considerably.

In that sense, a option show_on_serve (or something similar) could be added (defaulting to False) that would allow rendering the page without a password.

[joapuiib]

I got a prototype going in https://github.com/joapuiib/mkdocs-encryptcontent-plugin/tree/feature/show-serving.

The changes are specified here: joapuiib@0b43fb2

[unverbuggt]

I'd rather concentrate on slimming down the plugin of features most people won't need. It is as complex as it is because it grew in features over a long time.

Another idea would be to use environment variables to enable/disable the plugin ompletely if needed. We just need to add a switch in the plugin configuration.

[joapuiib]

Do you want me to try to implement this toggle?

[unverbuggt]

I found an issue on the mkdocstrings plugin where someone had a similar suggestion. It lead to some changes which were also discussed in the markdown-exec plugin. And there I found the information that this functionality is already implemented since mkdocs 1.6.