Support for symbolic linked .md files

[felipecrs]

Have you read the Contributing Guidelines on issues?

• [x] I have read the Contributing Guidelines on issues.

Motivation

This issue is kind of a continuation from:

• https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/issues/3579
• And https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/issues/3272#issuecomment-2778515784

I have a repository with many helm charts, docker images, and whatnot. I like to keep a README.md for each of these little sub-projects, right inside each folder.

That's so when people open the directories in GitHub, they will have the README rendered.

And also, I'd like to show them in my documentation portal.

For now, I'm creating symbolic links to all these READMEs into my website/docs dir, so that they get parsed by Docusaurus too. For that to work, I need to use the WebPack resolve.symlinks: false trick.

And it works great, except it does not work when the Docusaurus project is installed with pnpm install (and also deno install, which works the same way as pnpm).

So, it would be great if Docusaurus had direct support for reading symlinked .md files.

Self-service

• [ ] I'd be willing to do some initial work on this proposal myself.

[felipecrs]

Something else that just came into my mind is: if these symlinks were supported, it would be great if Docusaurus' default editUrl automatically resolved to the original file rather than to the symlink itself. Symlinks cannot be edited from GitHub's web interface.

[mdpratt]

I'm running into this exact same problem. We have our .md files spread across packages, and it would be great for a local dev build to symlink directly to those files. It's possible to do this by starting a nodemon to watch the files and then copy them in on update, but it feels a bit hacky.