Working on the Docs¶
This page is about working with the DDEV documentation. See the Writing Style Guide for stylistic guidance.
Fix Docs Using Web Browser¶
The documentation is built and checked automatically with various GitHub Actions workflows. While it may help to check your work locally for more involved PRs, you can more quickly make suggestions using GitHub in a browser:
- Click the pencil in the upper right. That will take you to the right page on GitHub.
- Click the pencil button on GitHub and follow the instructions to create your change.
- Save your changes and follow the prompts to create a PR.
- In the checks on your PR, click the “details” link by
docs/readthedocs.org:ddev
to browse the docs build created by your PR. - Once the PR has run its checks, you’ll see an item labeled
docs/readthedocs.org:ddev
. Click “Details” to review a docs build that includes your changes: - Take a look at the “Check docs” action to make sure there were no linting or spelling errors.
Fork or Clone the DDEV Repository¶
To start making changes you’ll need a local copy of the DDEV documentation, so fork the DDEV repository which includes the documentation.
After forking the repository, you can clone it to your local machine.
Make Changes¶
Now that you’ve got a local copy, you can make your changes.
Action | Path |
---|---|
Documentation | ./docs/content/users/* ./docs/content/developers/* |
MkDocs configuration | ./mkdocs.yml |
Front end | ./docs/content/assets/extra.css ./docs/content/assets/extra.js |
Preview Changes¶
Preview your changes locally by running make mkdocs-serve
.
This will launch a web server on port 8000 and automatically refresh pages as they’re edited.
No need to install MkDocs locally!
It’s easiest to install MkDocs locally, but you don’t have to. The make mkdocs-serve
command will look for and use a local binary, otherwise using make
to build and serve the documentation. If you don’t have make
installed on your system, you can directly run the command it would have instead:
TAG=$(arch)
if [ "${TAG}" = "arm64" ]; then TAG="${TAG}v8-1.5.2"; else TAG=1.5.2; fi
docker run -it -p 8000:8000 -v "${PWD}:/docs" -e "ADD_MODULES=mkdocs-material mkdocs-redirects mkdocs-minify-plugin mdx_truly_sane_lists mkdocs-git-revision-date-localized-plugin" -e "LIVE_RELOAD_SUPPORT=true" -e "FAST_MODE=true" -e "DOCS_DIRECTORY=./docs" "polinux/mkdocs:$TAG"
Installing mkdocs locally on macOS
On macOS with recent versions of Homebrew use this technique to install mkdocs:
Check Markdown for Errors¶
Run make markdownlint
before you publish changes to quickly check your files for errors or inconsistencies.
markdownlint-cli
required!
The make markdownlint
command requires you to have markdownlint-cli
installed, which you can do by executing npm install -g markdownlint-cli
Check for Spelling Errors¶
Run make pyspelling
to check for spelling errors. Output will be brief if all goes well:
If you’ve added a correctly-spelled word that gets flagged, like “Symfony” for example, you’ll need to add it to .spellcheckwordlist.txt
in the root of DDEV’s repository.
pyspelling
and aspell
required!
It’s probably best to install packages locally before attempting to run make pyspelling
:
Publish Changes¶
If all looks good, it’s time to commit your changes and make a pull request back into the official DDEV repository.
When you make a pull request, several tasks and test actions will be run. One of those is a task named docs/readthedocs.org:ddev
, which builds a version of the docs containing all the changes from your pull request. You can use that to confirm the final result is exactly what you’d expect.