We have a few users that need to run Coder from air-gapped networks, and to make that work fully, we need to support offline docs.

Constraints

• We don't want to increase the bundle size significantly. Right now, embedding the docs directly would add ~11MB to the binary which is not desired.

Proposed solution

• Pack the coder docs into a separate package/artifact during release so the operator could host the docs markdown files locally or anywhere else.
• Add an option to the Coder CLI to set the path or URL to the custom docs path coder server --offline-docs <docs-path> that could be a URL or a path to load the markdown files. It could also be an env variable like OFFLINE_DOCS=<docs-path> coder server.
• Add the offline_docs config into the deployment endpoint so the FE can knows it is using or not offline docs. It is also used from the FE to fetch the markdown files content.
• Add into the FE the related docs pages.
• Change the docs links in the app to use or not the offline docs if the options is enabled.

Possible issues

• The docs files need to be hosted in a web server so the FE can use the images and fetch the content properly. One possible solution would be to move the content fetching into the BE but we still need to have access to the images so it would not remove the web server dependency entirely.
• The docs should be hosted under the same domain to avoid CORS issues.