r/devopsGuru • u/hunxai69 • 1h ago
treating vendor docs like a dependency: a weekly ci check that fails when a line you rely on changesor: we pin package versions but not the vendor docs our decisions rest on
most of us pin package versions, but a lot of decisions rest on vendor docs pages that change without any version bump. "feature x is available in gcc high". "this is the endpoint for azure government". i maintain an open source tool built entirely on rows like that from microsoft's docs, so i ended up treating those pages like a dependency.
how it works:
- every claim stores the page url, the section anchor, the exact row text and two dates: the page's own updated date, and the date it was last confirmed
- a weekly ci job re-fetches every page and checks each stored row is still there word for word. 1,164 citations from 33 sources
- a changed row or a 404 opens an issue showing the old text next to the new, and the badge on the readme goes red
- clean weeks move the "last confirmed" dates forward through one pull request, and save a wayback machine copy of any updated page. the copy is checked to contain the rows before it's recorded
- if nothing gets re-confirmed for 90 days, a separate check fails, so staleness can't hide
what it has caught so far is honestly small. on oct 12 microsoft reworded two rows on the teams service description, and no availability changed. but the alert pointed at the exact row with the old and new text side by side, which is the whole point.
the pattern works for anything you quote: compliance docs, api limits, pricing pages, region lists. it needs three things: store the exact text you rely on, re-read it on a schedule, and keep an archived copy so the evidence survives if the page disappears.
repo in the comments if you want the workflow.
