Built-in group plugin

The group plugin allows to group plugins into logical units to conditionally enable or disable them for specific environments with the use of [environment variables][mkdocs.env], e.g., to only enable a subset of plugins when building your project during continuous integration (CI).

Objective

How it works

The plugin conditionally and lazily loads all plugins that are part of a group if and only if the group is enabled, which means that the plugin doesn't add any overhead when the group is disabled. It also means that the grouped plugins only need to be installed when the group is enabled.

The plugins that are part of the group are executed in the same order as if they were defined at the top-level in the list of [plugins][mkdocs.plugins]. Thus, order is preserved and deterministic.

When to use it

Whenever you're using multiple plugins that are only required in specific environments, e.g., when building your project during continuous integration (CI), the plugin is the perfect utility for making configuration simpler, as it removes the need for splitting configuration into multiple files.

It can be used with any built-in or third-party plugin.

Configuration

As with all built-in plugins, getting started with the group plugin is straightforward. Just add the following lines to mkdocs.yml, and start splitting plugins into logical units:

plugins:
  - group

The group plugin is built into Material for MkDocs and doesn't need to be installed.

General

The following settings are available:

Use this setting to enable or disable the plugin when building your project. The plugin behaves differently than all other built-in plugins – it is disabled by default. To enable a group, use:

plugins:
  - group:
      enabled: !ENV CI # (1)!

If you only want to use the group plugin for better organization and always want to enable the plugins that are part of it, use:
```
plugins:
  - group:
      enabled: true
```

The decision to disable the plugin by default was made to simplify the usage of environment variables, as it removes the need to provide a default value for an environment variable.

Now, when building your project, you can enable a group by setting the [environment variable][mkdocs.env]:

CI=true mkdocs build

Use this setting to list the plugins that are part of the group. The syntax is exactly the same as for the [plugins][mkdocs.plugins] setting, so you can simply copy the list of plugins that you want to group, e.g:

plugins:
  - group:
      plugins:
        - optimize
        - minify

The plugins mentioned here are just used for illustration purposes.