This document contains information on how the Fabric documentation is built and published as well as a few conventions one should be aware of before making changes to the doc.
The crux of the documentation is written in
reStructuredText which is
converted to HTML using Sphinx.
The HTML is then published on http://hyperledger-fabric.readthedocs.io
which has a hook so that any new content that goes into docs/source
on the main repository will trigger a new build and publication of the
doc.
- Source files are in RST format and found in the
docs/source
directory. - The main entry point is index.rst, so to add something into the Table of Contents you would simply modify that file in the same manner as all of the other topics. It's very self-explanatory once you look at it.
- Relative links should be used whenever possible. The preferred
syntax for this is: :doc:`anchor text <relativepath>`
Do not put the .rst suffix at the end of the filepath. - For non RST files, such as text files, MD or YAML files, link to the file on github, like this one for instance: https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric/blob/master/docs/README.md
Notes: The above means we have a dependency on the github mirror repository. Relative links are unfortunately not working on github when browsing through a RST file.
Making any changes to the documentation will require you to test your changes by building the doc in a way similar to how it is done for production. There are two possible setups you can use to do so: setting up your own staging repo and publication website, or building the docs on your machine. The following sections cover both options:
You can easily build your own staging repo following these steps:
- Go to http://readthedocs.org and sign up for an account.
- Create a project.
Your username will preface the URL and you may want to append
-fabric
to ensure that you can distinguish between this and other docs that you need to create for other projects. So for example:yourgithubid-fabric.readthedocs.io/en/latest
. - Click
Admin
, clickIntegrations
, clickAdd integration
, chooseGitHub incoming webhook
, then clickAdd integration
. - Fork Fabric on GitHub.
- From your fork, go to
Settings
in the upper right portion of the screen. - Click
Webhooks
. - Click
Add webhook
. - Add the ReadTheDocs's URL into
Payload URL
. - Choose
Let me select individual events
:Pushes
、Branch or tag creation
、Branch or tag deletion
. - Click
Add webhook
.
Now anytime you modify or add documentation content to your fork, this URL will automatically get updated with your changes!
Here are the quick steps to achieve this on a local machine without depending on ReadTheDocs, starting from the main fabric directory. Note: you may need to adjust depending on your OS.
Prereqs:
cd fabric/docs
pipenv install
pipenv shell
make html
This will generate all the html files in docs/build/html
which you can
then start browsing locally using your browser. Every time you make a
change to the documentation you will of course need to rerun make html
.
In addition, if you'd like, you may also run a local web server with the following commands (or equivalent depending on your OS):
sudo apt-get install apache2
cd build/html
sudo cp -r * /var/www/html/
You can then access the html files at http://localhost/index.html
.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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