It might be worth considering an "ignore" option for InclusionLevel which would additionally not copy to the server, although I think the '--clean' option provides most of the benefit already.

To be clear, it's still usable as is. A normal user would not even notice the extra site folder since nothing links to it. It just copies more than it needs to into the temp directory that serves the site.

It performs as expected on a normal build.

@oprypin I updated this one after rebasing on top of #3476

The site directory is now appropriately marked as excluded both in build and serve.

Note that advertising that site_dir can be contained within docs_dir, albeit it might be supported, could break a lot of plugins that do not source their files from the Files collection, but use something like glob or other ways of enumerating files in the docs_dir. One might argue that those approaches are not idiomatic, but I've seen them more than often (and am guilty as well), so this change has quite some potential for frustration.

I wouldn't advocate for changing the default from the 'docs' directory. I think there are legitimate use cases for wanting to call mkdocs from root though. It's a feature that's been requested a fair amount through mkdocs history.

This feature would be useful for documentation-only sites and personal sites deployed with pages.

This can be done with https://github.com/jupyter-book/jupyter-book, which might be a good resource. Here's an example...

• https://gitlab.com/MatthewSteen/usa-politics

Note, another related feature (if not already implemented) would be to allow the index.md to be in the root dir (or readme.md).