Deployment

MatCreator supports two primary deployment shapes:

• Personal application: run the CLI and web UI on a local workstation or single-user server.
• Server deployment: run a shared multi-user Docker deployment with isolated user workers.

The documentation site itself is deployed separately with MkDocs Material and GitHub Pages.

Documentation Site

The public documentation is built with MkDocs Material and deployed to GitHub Pages by GitHub Actions.

Local preview:

pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
mkdocs serve

Production build:

mkdocs build --strict

The published site is expected at:

https://ai4ms.github.io/MatCreator/

In the GitHub repository settings, set Settings -> Pages -> Build and deployment -> Source to GitHub Actions.

Choosing A Deployment Mode

Mode	Best for	Main command
Personal application	Local development, individual research workflows, workstation use	bash script/start_matcreator.sh
Server deployment	Shared group server with multiple registered users	docker compose -f docker-compose.server.yml up -d

Use personal application mode first unless you specifically need multi-user isolation, centralized auth, and Docker worker lifecycle management.