Introduction
📝 IMPORTANT You are reading the archived v1 documentation. It describes the first release of OwnDocs and no longer changes.
For the current release, read the latest introduction.
Software outlives its documentation only when the old documentation gets deleted. This page is the v1 introduction, kept online in its original form for anyone still running the first release. It answers two questions: what shipped in v1, and why this page is still here at all.
What the first release covered
v1 was the starting point of OwnDocs. It shipped four things, and everything the release did for a reader came out of those four.
Public and private access modes. A v1 site could be published openly to anyone who had the URL, or kept private so only the people you allowed could read it. The same content and the same build served both; the mode decided who got in.
MDX documentation pages. Pages were written in MDX, so prose and React components lived in the same file. Authors wrote Markdown for the text and dropped in components where a plain paragraph wasn't enough.
Full-text search. Readers could search the text of the documentation instead of clicking through the sidebar to find a page. That mattered most on sites large enough that nobody remembers where a topic lives.
Theme variants. The site's colors came from a set of theme variants, so changing the look meant picking a different variant rather than rewriting styles by hand.
Why this page is still published
Documentation that describes code you aren't running is worse than no documentation, because it sends you looking for buttons and settings that aren't there. Archiving solves that. Readers who haven't upgraded yet keep a version of the docs that matches the release they actually have installed, while the current documentation is free to move ahead without dragging old behavior along with it.
The tradeoff is that an archived page goes stale on purpose. Nothing here gets corrected or extended. Treat it as a record of what v1 was, not as advice about what to do today.
How OwnDocs Versioning Works
This page doubles as a live example of how versioning works, since it's the only archived page in this site. The rule behind it is simple: the version name in the URL is what makes a page archived. Drop it, and you're back on the version that's actually maintained.
This exact page lives at /v1/getting-started/introduction. The v1 segment is
what marks it as the frozen snapshot you're reading now. Its current-release
counterpart lives at the same path with that segment removed:
/getting-started/introduction. That's not a coincidence or a redirect — it's
the whole scheme. A version with no name in the URL, often called "latest," is
the one that ships new code, gets new components, and answers support questions.
An archived version like v1 is frozen: what you read here today is what you'll
read here next year.
The version picker in the sidebar is the fast way to move between them, and it's smarter than a plain link. If the page you're on exists under the version you're switching to, it takes you to that same page. If it doesn't — this page is a good example, since v1 only ever had this one introduction — it sends you to that version's home instead of a broken link. Either way, picking "Latest" is how you get back to the code, components, and examples that match what you'd actually deploy today.
See also
- Introduction — the current release, kept up to date.