RingCentral Developer Guide Documentation

This repository is the home of the RingCentral Developer Guide: a collection of materials, and documentation to help educate developers on how to build on top of the RingCentral platform.

This repository powers the production of two key resources:

1. RingCentral Developer Guide
2. RingCentral Tutorials Index

Inside this Repository

RingCentral's Developer Guide is powered by Read the Docs, and makes up the bulk of this repository. To contribute to this documentation effort, start by looking at mydocs.yml which powers the generation of the table of contents and points to the specific documents located within the docs directory.

RingCentral's Tutorials index aggregates content found here, as well as content across the web. It is powered by tutorials.json.

Contributing

If you would like to contribute to the RingCentral documentation effort, fork this repository, make your desired edits and contributions, and issue a pull request accordingly.

Running the Developer Guide locally

The Developer Guide is built on top of Mkdocs, a self-contained documentation server. Writers are encouraged to install Mkdocs locally so that you can edit files and preview your changes before they are pushed to production servers.

git clone https://github.com/ringcentral/ringcentral-api-docs.git
cd ringcentral-api-docs
pip install mkdocs
pip install -r requirements.txt
mkdocs serve

Then you should be able to load http://localhost:8000 to view the documentation.

Please be aware that the local version of the Developer Guide utilizes a Mkdocs theme that mimics our main documentation site, but it is not the same -- hence some of the visual differences you may observe. When the Developer Guide is published officially, mkdocs is used to generate HTML files, and those HTML files are then loaded into a different presentation framework.

How to test and verify code samples

First, let's setup our python virtual environment within which the code checking framework will be run. We will do this from the root directory of ringcentral-api-docs. Then we will install the code checking framework within that virtual environment.

cd $GITHUB/ringcentral-api-docs
python3 -m venv .
source ./bin/activate
python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
pip3 install mkdocs-codecheck

The code checking framework can be installed via pip (mkdocs-codecheck), or the bleeding edge version can be downloaded and installed from github.

Next, you need to install all the various libraries and other prerequisites used within the code samples for all of the languages we support.

For python code samples

pip install ringcentral
pip install python-dotenv

For PHP code samples

php composer.phar require ringcentral/ringcentral-php

For Java code samples

To test java code samples, you will need to make sure you have Java installed, and your CLASSPATH has been setup properly to point to the following jar files.

• RingCentral Java SDK
• Jetty Util, Server and Servlet
• J2EE
• Gson
• FastJSON

STEPS to compile and run Java Sample Code using Maven (make sure maven build tool)

git clone <this repository>
cd ringcentral-api-docs/code-samples/java-samples
mvn clean compile

TODO (internal):

1. Adjust mkdocs script for Java so it no longer relies on CLASSPATH environment variable, instead uses maven to compile, run, test Java sample code.
2. Add JUnit Tests

For DotNet and .cs code samples

Mac and Linux users can install the dotnet-sdk package via brew:

brew install --cask dotnet-sdk

Then you will need to install the RingCentral SDK, globally:

dotnet tool install --global RingCentral.Net

Create a .env file

Create a .env file in the code-samples directory by copying and editing the provided template. This file will make reference to an app for which all permissions have been enabled. Embed that app's credentials in your .env in the appropriate fields.

cp code-samples/env-template code-samples/.env

Run the testing framework

With all necessary software installed, you can now run the script. Run the script from the root directory of ringcentral-api-docs and be sure your python virtual environment is activated.

cd $GITHUB/ringcentral-api-docs
sh ./bin/activate
mkdocs-codecheck --verbose --recurse --dotenv ./code-samples/.env ./code-samples

Tips for Styling Documentation

View our styleguide

Our styleguide serves as a reference for the various documentation syntaxes to help writers format their documentation and utilize markdown to its fullest extent. The styleguide demonstrates the following styles:

• Fenced Code Blocks
• Admonitions, or call outs
• Tables
• Syntax highlighting and line highlighting

Customizing the underlying theme and HTML

For local development, mkdocs uses a RingCentral Mkdocs Theme. If you wish to affect the underlying structure of the site you have two choices:

• Override locally
• Fix globally

To override locally, consult the mkdocs documentation on creating a custom theme. The process involves overriding theme files with your own custom files. This requires you understand the underlying theme structure, so consult the structure of mkdocs-ringcentral.

To make a change globally, you can also submit a pull request to mkdocs-ringcentral and the change can be propagated across all documentation projects that utilize it.

Utilizing components from Bootstrap

Our documentation is all based on the open-source CSS framework called Bootstrap. It makes available a number of commonly used UI components that can be cut and paste into our docs and be rendered faithfully.

• Visit the Bootstrap Component Library to learn more

Using the Material component library

Our documentation also makes use of the Mkdocs Material Plugin. This plugin is what renders admonitions for example.

!!! note "Phasellus posuere in sem ut cursus"
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla et euismod.

This plugin extends the markdown language new ways of encoding text in markdown, including:

• admonitions
• footnotes/citations
• HTML meta tags

There are a number of other Markdown extensions available through Material as well.

Embedding Code Samples in documentation

Inside of this repository is a code-samples directory, into which is placed all the code samples that can be found in our documentation. Each code sample stored here is a fully functional, stand-alone script that can be run directly by a developer.

Writers can then include content from a code sample using the following syntax:

{! code-samples/path/to/code-sample.js [ln:35-48] !}

The above example includes the file referenced, but only lines 35 through 48. This makes it possible to only include fragments of a code sample, while maintaining the integrity of the code sample's ability to be run as a stand-alone script.

This include functionality is provided by the mdx_include extension. Consult its documentation to learn how to use it more effectively.