The site is based on the Bootstrap framework, and the content structure is designed to be simple, informative, intuitive and fast -- just like NATS! Please keep these principles in mind as you modify existing content or design new content for the nats.io site.
For more information on Bootstrap's themes, conventions, and content support (HTML/CSS/JS), please visit the Bootstrap website.
- Contributing Content
- General Style Guidelines and Conventions
- Content Organization
- Adding Documentation
- Adding Content Pages
- Adding a Blog Entry
- Local Development
We view this project as a perpetual work in progress that can greatly benefit from and be enriched by the knowledge, wisdom and experience of our community.
We follow the standard Fork-and-Branch GitHub workflow. If you're not familiar with this process, please refer to either of the following excellent guides:
We encourage and welcome your contributions to any part or element of this site. We will review and discuss with you any contributions or corrections submitted via GitHub Pull Request.
- Use topic-based files and titles
- Use only headers 1 (#), 2 (##) and 3 (###)
- Use single spaces to separate sentences
- Markdown syntax: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#img
- Links:
[NATS](http://nats.io/) - Cross references:
[Clients](/clients/) - Images:
- Links:
- Triple ticks for code, commands to run, user operations, input/output
- Single ticks for executable names, file paths, inline commands, parameters, etc.
- Graphics: save as
*.png; source in/src/img/nats-brokered-throughput-comparison.png
The basic organization of the site is very simple, with each top navigation link corresponding to a Markdown file in the nats-site/content directory.
The HTML documents and any Markdown documents contained in this directory are assembled by Hugo and rendered to static HTML during the build process.
The structure of the content directory is as follows:
- /content
- /blog
- /documentation
- /download
- about.html
- community.html
- index.html
- support.html
The html files or directories should be pretty self explanatory for what pages they are used for.
The NATS documentation is a collection of Markdown articles located in `nats-docs/content and organized into the following categories/subdirectories:
| Category | Subirectory |
|---|---|
| Getting Started | documentation |
| Clients | documentation/clients |
| Concepts | documentation/concepts |
| Internals | documentation/internals |
| Tutorials | documentation/tutorials |
The Markdown documents contained in these directories are assembled by Hugo and listed in their respective categories in a navigation menu at the left side of every page.
- Use topic-based files and titles
- Use only headers 1 (#), 2 (##) and 3 (###)
- Use single spaces to separate sentences
- Markdown syntax: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#img
- Links:
[NATS](http://nats.io/) - Cross references:
[NATS protocol](/documentation/internals/nats-protocol.md) - Images:
- Links:
- Triple ticks for code, commands to run, user operations, input/output
- Single ticks for executable names, file paths, inline commands, parameters, etc.
- Graphics: save as
*.pngsource in/src/img/documentation/nats-img-src.graffle - Run
gulpin the root of the app, this will automatically place the image in the correct location for use
Any new page should be a Markdown document placed inside /content/documentation/. Place it inside of one of the current sub folders in /content/documentation or add a new category/folder. Directions are below for adding a new category for documentation.
Each page added needs a header like the following:
+++
date = "2015-09-27"
title = "NATS Messaging"
category = "concepts"
[menu.main]
name = "Messaging"
weight = 1
identifier = "concepts-nats-messaging"
parent = "Concepts"
+++
- date: Use the format of: Year-Month-Day Example: 2015-09-27
- title: Title of the page
- category: Directory path to file
For the menu portion, follow this:
- Name: Name of the menu item in the left nav
- Weight: When listing pages it signifies its importance and where it should land in the list
- Identifier: This is used behind the scenes for page generation and menu building. Please make sure its unique for each page
- Parent: Set this to the exact name of the category this page is is.
Modify config.toml to add the category and its weight (list position) to menu.main. Below you will see an example of some pre existing categories as well as a new category specified as: New Category.
[[menu.main]]
name = "Documentation"
weight = 2
identifier = "documentation"
url = "/documentation"
[[menu.main]]
name = "Getting Started"
weight = 0
parent = "documentation"
[[menu.main]]
name = "Clients"
weight = 1
parent = "documentation"
[[menu.main]]
name = "New Category"
weight = 2
parent = "documentation"
Any new page should be a raw HTML or Markdown document placed beneath the content directory. Each page added needs a header like the following:
+++
date = "2015-09-01"
title = "New Page"
description = "Some page description can go here"
+++
- date format: Year-Month-Day
- title: Title of the page
- cssid: Page specific css id used on the body tag for page specific styles
- description: Description of the page
In the current design, adding a new page to the main menu requires adding that page's title to the
[[menu.main]]inconfig.toml:
[[menu.main]]
name = "Support"
weight = 3
identifier = "support"
url = "/support"
[[menu.main]]
name = "Community"
weight = 4
identifier = "community"
url = "/community"
[[menu.main]]
name = "New Page"
weight = 5
identifier = "new-page"
url = "/new-page"
To add a new quote and logo to /community you are going to have to modify /layouts/partials/quotes.html and follow the convention as seen from the existing quotes.
If you have a logo to go along with the quote, just add a full size .jpeg or .png logo to /src/user_logos. Then run gulp in the terminal to generate the proper image size. Then link do the generated image in static/img/user_logos. Example: <img src="/img/user_logos/FILENAME.EXT">
To add a new blog entry, use the hugo new command like the following:
hugo new blog/page-url-for-blog-post.md
Replace page-url-for-blog-post with a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly page url like: nats-lands-in-london. So the resulting command would be: hugo new blog/nats-lands-in-london. Then new blog entry would reside at: http://nats.io/blog/nats-lands-in-london
Once the command is run you can find the new blog entry in content/blog/nats-lands-in-london.md.
In the frontmatter of the new entry you will see metadata like this:
+++
date = "2019-12-01"
draft = true
title = "NATS Lands in London"
author = "Esteemed NATS Thought Leader"
categories = ["Engineering"]
tags = ["NATS"]
+++
Make sure to update that page metadata to reflect the specifics of your post (author, targeted publish date, etc.).
By default, draft = true is set on blog posts. When a post has this status, it won't be published to the production site, but it will be viewable via the Netlify deploy preview. The following must be true for a post to go live on the site:
- The post's date must not be in the future
- The
draftparameter must be set tofalseor not be present
For Categories you are going to add on or more of the following:
- General
- Engineering
- Community
So for our example we would change categories in the frontmatter to:
categories = ["Community"]
The date timestamp should be the exact time you ran the command to create the new blog entry. If you need to change it make sure you follow the same convention that is already there. date = "2015-11-05T11:45:03-08:00"
For Tags, you can add as many tags as you feel are needed and they can be anything:
tags = ["nats","london","community"]
A default title is generated from the url you provided with the hugo command but we recommend you change this to something is better suited for display purposes. Example: title = "NATS Lands In London"
To add images to a blog entry, first place them in /src/blog. You may add images of any size, but please make sure they are at least 800x600 for quality purposes. Once added, run gulp in the root of the repo. This will automatically resize any images added and put them in the proper place.
You may link to these images then. Example: <img src="/img/blog/IMAGE-NAME.png">
To add an embedded tweet, you just need to grab the embed code from the tweet, and then wrap the embed code in a div as follows:
<div class="tweet-embed-con">
<!-- Twitter Embed code goes here -->
</div>
Check out the blog entry /content/blog/nats-lands-in-london.md for a detailed example.
For adding content to the blog entry, please follow the style guidelines and conventions below.
You can either user docker image for your local development or install requirements following this documentation.
Clone your forked copy of the repository:
git clone git@github.com:<YOUR GIT USERNAME>/nats-site.git
Change to the directory:
cd nats-site/
Install Hugo, npm, ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick.
Building the NATS site/documentation currently requires Hugo version 0.53 or higher. Installation instructions can be found here.
If you are running on MacOS, you can try issuing the command make setup, this command will brew install requirements. Please refer to the Makefile for more information.
Enter the following commands to install additional software dependencies (if you used make setup you can skip this next step.)
npm install
npm install --global gulp-cliImages and other source assets live in the src directory. The build workflow will resize images, and compile files in src and create the assets directory for hugo.
gulp buildThe gulp command will do a build of the src directory and copy assets to the the static directory. This command will also run hugo and process the content directory creating a snapshot of the site in the public directory.
To preview your changes, run:
hugo serverhugo server starts hugo as a server. You can directly edit your forked repository and then go to http://127.0.0.1:1313 to preview your changes on a browser.
Whenever src is modified, remember to run gulp build to update the static directory, and allow hugo to see the changes.
Create a new blog post :
hugo new blog/my-blog-post.md