Recommendations for generating RTD-style version dropdown

[mwcraig]

I'd like to add a "version" selector to my jupyterbook www.astropy.org/ccd-reduction-and-photometry-guide/.

The idea is that tags correspond to "editions" of a book and the user should be able to select the edition they want. An example of this sort of thing is on RTD and on the MetPy documentation: https://unidata.github.io/MetPy/latest/

Any suggestions for implementing this in jupyter-book? Can I populate extra_navbar with auto-generated content as a build step, for example?

I can already generate a list of versions to populate a dropdown...the question is how to get that in my rendered pages with the least effort.

[choldgraf]

there has been some recent efforts in the pydata theme to implement a version dropdown, and that might make its way into jupyter book / sphinx-book-theme, though the API may change a bit. Check out some conversations about this below:

Docs:

https://pydata-sphinx-theme.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user_guide/configuring.html#add-a-dropdown-to-switch-between-docs-versions

And some follow-up issues:

• Use self-contained widgets for UI elements (e.g. the version switcher) pydata/pydata-sphinx-theme#601
• Drop the switcher template URL interpolation, and ask users to provide explicit URLs pydata/pydata-sphinx-theme#600