Hosted documentation

Overview

Hosted documentation lets you publish rich, structured documentation for your packages directly inside Privato. When enabled, your customers can read your docs through the customer portal after purchasing a license — no separate documentation site required.

Hosted documentation is available on the Growth and Scale plans.

Limitations

Assets such as images and videos are not currently supported. This may be added in a future update with storage limits applied per package.

How it works

Privato reads your documentation from your GitHub repository. When you publish a new release, Privato automatically syncs the content and makes it available to customers in their portal.

Each page is a Markdown file and the navigation structure is defined in a small JSON configuration file, both stored inside a docs/ directory at the root of your repository.

Setting up

1. Enable hosted documentation

In your Privato dashboard, open the package and go to the Settings tab. Enable the Hosted documentation toggle to activate the feature for that package.

2. Create the configuration file

Add a docs/privato.json file to your repository. This file defines the navigation structure for your docs — the groups and the order of pages within each group.

{
    "navigation": {
        "groups": [
            {
                "name": "Getting started",
                "pages": ["installation", "quick-start"]
            },
            {
                "name": "Usage",
                "pages": ["configuration", "advanced"]
            }
        ]
    }
}

Each entry in pages is the filename of a Markdown file (without the .md extension).

3. Write your documentation pages

Create a Markdown file inside docs/ for each page referenced in your configuration. Every file must include a YAML frontmatter block at the top with at least a title field.

---
title: Installation
description: Get up and running in minutes.
---

## Requirements

...

The description field is optional but recommended — it is displayed as a subtitle beneath the page title in the portal.

4. Publish a release

Once your docs/privato.json and Markdown files are committed and pushed, publish a new release from your repository. Privato will pick up the release and sync your documentation automatically.

Repository structure

A typical repository layout looks like this:

your-package/
├── docs/
│   ├── privato.json
│   ├── installation.md
│   ├── quick-start.md
│   ├── configuration.md
│   └── advanced.md
├── src/
└── ...

Viewing your documentation

Once synced, customers can access your documentation through the customer portal. A Docs link will appear in the portal for each package that has hosted documentation configured.

The documentation is accessible to anyone who visits the customer portal.

Keeping content in sync

Privato syncs your documentation automatically whenever a new release is published and picked up by Privato. To update your docs, publish a new release from your repository and Privato will sync the latest content from your docs/ directory.

If you need to trigger a sync without publishing a release, you can do so manually from the Settings tab of your package in the Privato dashboard.