Building a private gh-pages clone with Dexy and GitLab

At work I was looking for a way to write project documentation for several non-public projects. It was important for me to have a system that was versioncontrolled in GIT, written in easy to understand formatting for both technical and non-technical personel (markdown) and makes publishing effortless. The resulting documentation should also be easy to access for our clients, without resorting to getting them all an account.

In a presentation by Stephen Hay at the Mobilism 2012 conference I was pointed to dexy, an advanced tool for writing documentation in a lot of different languages, markdown being one of them. In this post I will describe how to setup dexy, and combine it with GitLab's webhook system to create a selfbuilding documentation system.