How can I reproduce a bug in an OSS project that uses insiders if I'm not an insider of the organization behind the project?

[corneliusroemer]

How can I reproduce a bug in an OSS project using insiders if I'm not part of the organization and hence don't have access to insiders through it?

It seems your sponsorship model makes that impossible? Unless I pay for individual sponsorship? But that might also not be right as the OSS project I'd work on is commercial? This question doesn't seem to be answered in the docs after reading them fairly carefully.

[alexvoss]

I am not sure I understand the problem right. If you or your company are not a sponsor then you should be working with the public version of Material for MkDocs. Are you looking to reproduce an issue for someone else who is using Insiders?

[kamilkrzyskow]

Hi @corneliusroemer,
depends on the situation like Alex mentioned above.

If somebody uses the Insiders version of the theme to publish the final docs page, and wants external contributors for their docs page, then it's the responsibility of that somebody to maintain 2 mkdocs.yml configurations for internal company users with Insiders and Public external users. So the same way as this repository has 2 different mkdocs.yml files:

• https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material/blob/master/mkdocs.yml
• https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material-insiders/blob/master/mkdocs.yml

If that somebody relies too heavily on the Insiders features, and maintaining both Public and Insiders configs is impossible and/or adds too much overhead. Then the repository can switch to a Insiders-only variant, where the source "compilation" can be done only by the internal team. But what about Public external contributors? To still provide access to such users one solution would be to use build previews for their edits.

I believe that Privacy Guides did something similar, each PR they get gets a temporary Netlify build.
https://github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org

But looking at one of the most recent PRs they switched from Netlify to a custom solution 👀, I'm not sure what was the cause of this.
The comment says that the preview also doesn't provide all mkdocs-material features, so maybe malicious users used the preview mode to build Insiders builds of their own custom websites for free 👁️ 👄 👁️

Such a thing could be mitigated using some simple security checks, so I doubt this was the case.

So, basically these are the 2 options I see, either have 2 variants of the config to allow external contributors, or separate the build process for Insiders build to allow external users to use your CI for testing.