chore: use a virtualenv for working with the docs site

.gitignore

@@ -12,4 +12,6 @@ src/pip-delete-this-directory.txt
 
 TEST-*.xml
 
+tcvenv
+
 **/go.work

Makefile

@@ -12,3 +12,25 @@ test-examples:
 tidy-all:
 	make -C examples tidy-examples
 	make -C modules tidy-modules
+
+## -------------------------------------
+
+TCENV=tcvenv
+PYTHONBIN=./$(TCENV)/bin
+
+tcvenv: tcvenv/touchfile
+
+tcvenv/touchfile:
+	@echo "Creating docs $(TCENV)..."
+	test -d $(TCENV) || python3 -m venv $(TCENV)
+	@echo "Installing requirements..."
+	. $(PYTHONBIN)/activate; pip install -Ur requirements.txt
+	touch $(TCENV)/touchfile
+
+clean-docs:
+	@echo "Destroying docs $(TCENV)..."
+	rm -rf $(TCENV)
+
+.PHONY: serve-docs
+serve-docs: tcvenv
+	. $(PYTHONBIN)/activate; $(PYTHONBIN)/mkdocs serve

docs/contributing_docs.md

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 # Contributing to documentation
 
-The Testcontainers for Go documentation is a static site built with [MkDocs](https://www.mkdocs.org/).
+The _Testcontainers for Go_ documentation is a static site built with [MkDocs](https://www.mkdocs.org/).
 We use the [Material for MkDocs](https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/) theme, which offers a number of useful extensions to MkDocs.
 
 In addition we use a [custom plugin](https://github.com/rnorth/mkdocs-codeinclude-plugin) for inclusion of code snippets.
@@ -11,9 +11,19 @@ We publish our documentation using Netlify.
 
 ### Using Python locally
 
-* Ensure that you have Python 3.8.0 or higher.
-* Set up a virtualenv and run `pip install -r requirements.txt` in the `testcontainers-go` root directory.
-* Once Python dependencies have been installed, run `mkdocs serve` to start a local auto-updating MkDocs server.
+From the root directory of the repository, you can use the following command to build and serve the documentation locally:
+
+```shell
+make serve-docs
+```
+
+It will use a Python's virtual environment to install the required dependencies and start a local server at `http://localhost:8000`.
+
+Once finished, you can destroy the virtual environment with the following command:
+
+```shell
+make clean-docs
+```
 
 ### PR Preview deployments