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Documentation starter pack

The Documentation starter pack contains tools and configuration options for building a documentation site with Sphinx. Its main features include:

• bundled Sphinx theme, configuration, and extensions
• build checks: links, spelling, inclusive language

One strong point of the starter pack is its support for customisation that is layered on top of a core configuration - this applies to all the above features. There are also many other goodies included to enrich your doc set.

Contents

This README is divided into two main parts: enable the starter pack or work with your documentation post-enablement.

• Enable the starter pack
  • Initialise your repository
    • Standalone documentation repository
    • Documentation in a code repository
    • Automation
  • Build the documentation
  • Configure the documentation
    • Configure the header
    • Activate/deactivate feedback button
    • Configure included extensions
    • Add custom configuration
  • Change log
• Work with your documentation
  • Install prerequisite software
  • View the documentation
  • Local checks
    • Local build
    • Spelling check
    • Inclusive language check
    • Link check
  • Configure the spelling check
  • Customisation of inclusive language checks
  • Configure the link check
  • Add redirects
  • Other resources

Enable the starter pack

This section is for repository administrators. It shows how to initialise a repository with the starter pack. Once this is done, documentation contributors should follow section Work with your documentation.

Note: After setting up your repository with the starter pack, you need to track the changes made to it and manually update your repository with the required files. The change log lists the most relevant (and of course all breaking) changes. We're planning to provide the contents of this repository as an installable package in the future to make updates easier.

See the Read the Docs at Canonical and How to publish documentation on Read the Docs guides for instructions on how to get started with Sphinx documentation.

Initialise your repository

You can either create a standalone documentation project based on this repository or include the files from this repository in a dedicated documentation folder in an existing code repository. The next two sections show the steps needed for each scenario.

See the Automation section if you would like to have this done via a shell script.

Standalone documentation repository

To create a standalone documentation repository, clone this starter pack repository, update the configuration, and then commit all files to the documentation repository.

You don't need to move any files, and you don't need to do any special configuration on Read the Docs.

Here is one way to do this for newly-created fictional docs repository canonical/alpha-docs:

git clone git@github.com:canonical/sphinx-docs-starter-pack alpha-docs
cd alpha-docs
rm -rf .git
git init
git branch -m main
UPDATE THE CONFIGURATION AND BUILD THE DOCS
git add -A
git commit -m "Import sphinx-docs-starter-pack"
git remote add upstream git@github.com:canonical/alpha-docs
git push -f upstream main

Documentation in a code repository

To add documentation to an existing code repository:

1. create a directory called docs at the root of the code repository
2. populate the above directory with the contents of the starter pack repository (with the exception of the .git directory)
3. copy the file(s) located in the docs/.github/workflows directory into the code repository's .github/workflows directory
4. in the above workflow file(s), change the value of the working-directory field from . to docs
5. create a symbolic link to the docs/.wokeignore file from the root directory of the code repository
6. in file docs/.readthedocs.yaml set the following:
   • post_checkout: cd docs && python3 build_requirements.py
   • configuration: docs/conf.py
   • requirements: docs/.sphinx/requirements.txt

Note: When configuring RTD itself for your project, the setting "Path for .readthedocs.yaml" (under Advanced Settings) will need to be given the value of docs/.readthedocs.yaml.

Automation

To automate the initialisation for either scenario ensure you have the following:

• A GitHub repository where you want to host your documentation, cloned to your local machine. The recommended approach is to host the documentation alongside your code in a docs folder. But a standalone documentation repository is also an option; in this case, start with an empty repository.
• Git and Bash installed on your system.

There is a provided init.sh Bash script that does the following:

• clones the starter pack GitHub repository
• creates the specified installation directory if necessary
• updates working directory paths in workflow files, and updates configuration paths in the .readthedocs.yaml file
• copies and moves contents and .github files from the starter pack to the installation directory
• deletes the cloned repository when it's done

To use the script:

1. copy init.sh to your repository's root directory
2. run the script: ./init.sh
3. enter the installation directory when prompted. For standalone repositories, enter ".". For documentation alongside code, enter the folder where your documentation is (e.g. docs)

When the script completes, review all changes before committing them.

Build the documentation

The documentation needs to be built in order to be published. This is explained in more detail in section Local checks (for contributors), but at this time you should verify a successful build. Run the following commands from where your doc files were placed (repository root or the docs directory):

make install
make html

Configure the documentation

You must modify some of the default configuration to suit your project. To simplify keeping your documentation in sync with the starter pack, all custom configuration is located in the custom_conf.py file. You should never modify the common conf.py file.

Go through all settings in the Project information section of the custom_conf.py file and update them for your project.

See the following sections for further customisation.

Configure the header

By default, the header contains your product tag, product name (taken from the project setting in the custom_conf.py file), a link to your product page, and a drop-down menu for "More resources" that contains links to Discourse and GitHub.

You can change any of those links or add further links to the "More resources" drop-down by editing the .sphinx/_templates/header.html file. For example, you might want to add links to announcements, tutorials, getting started guides, or videos that are not part of the documentation.

Activate/deactivate feedback button

A feedback button is included by default, which appears at the top of each page in the documentation. It redirects users to your GitHub issues page, and populates an issue for them with details of the page they were on when they clicked the button.

If your project does not use GitHub issues, set the github_issues variable in the custom_conf.py file to an empty value to disable both the feedback button and the issue link in the footer. If you want to deactivate only the feedback button, but keep the link in the footer, set disable_feedback_button in the custom_conf.py file to True.

Configure included extensions

The starter pack includes a set of extensions that are useful for all documentation sets. They are pre-configured as needed, but you can customise their configuration in the custom_conf.py file.

The following extensions are always included:

• sphinx-design_
• sphinx_copybutton_
• sphinxcontrib.jquery_

The following extensions will automatically be included based on the configuration in the custom_conf.py file:

• sphinx_tabs.tabs_
• sphinx_reredirects_
• sphinxext.opengraph_
• lxd-sphinx-extensions_ (youtube-links, related-links, custom-rst-roles, and terminal-output)
• myst_parser_

You can add further extensions in the custom_extensions variable in custom_conf.py.

Add custom configuration

To add custom configurations for your project, see the Additions to default configuration and Additional configuration sections in the custom_conf.py file. These can be used to extend or override the common configuration, or to define additional configuration that is not covered by the common conf.py file.

The following links can help you with additional configuration:

• Sphinx configuration
• Sphinx extensions
• Furo documentation (Furo is the Sphinx theme we use as our base.)

Change log

See the change log for a list of relevant changes to the starter pack.

Work with your documentation

This section is for documentation contributors. It assumes that the current repository has been initialised with the starter pack as described in section Enable the starter pack.

There are make targets defined in the Makefile that do various things. To get started, we will:

• install prerequisite software
• view the documentation

Install prerequisite software

To install the prerequisites:

make install

This will create the required software list (.sphinx/requirements.txt) which is used to create a virtual environment (.sphinx/venv) and install dependency software within it.

You can add further Python modules to the required software list (.sphinx/requirements.txt) in the custom_required_modules variable in the custom_conf.py` file.

Note: By default, the starter pack uses the latest compatible version of all tools and does not pin its requirements. This might change temporarily if there is an incompatibility with a new tool version. There is therefore no need in using a tool like Renovate to automatically update the requirements.

View the documentation

To view the documentation:

make run

This will do several things:

• activate the virtual environment
• build the documentation
• serve the documentation on 127.0.0.1:8000
• rebuild the documentation each time a file is saved
• send a reload page signal to the browser when the documentation is rebuilt

The run target is therefore very convenient when preparing to submit a change to the documentation.

Note

If you encounter the error locale.Error: unsupported locale setting when activating the Python virtual environment, include the environment variable in the command and try again: LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 make run

Local checks

Before committing and pushing changes, it's a good practice to run various checks locally to catch issues early in the development process.

Local build

Run a clean build of the docs to surface any build errors that would occur in RTD:

make clean-doc
make html

Spelling check

Ensure there are no spelling errors in the documentation:

make spelling

Inclusive language check

Ensure the documentation uses inclusive language:

make woke

Link check

Validate links within the documentation:

make linkcheck

Configure the spelling check

The spelling check uses aspell. Its configuration is located in the .sphinx/spellingcheck.yaml file.

To add exceptions for words flagged by the spelling check, edit the .custom_wordlist.txt file. You shouldn't edit .wordlist.txt, because this file is maintained and updated centrally and contains words that apply across all projects.

Customisation of inclusive language checks

By default, the inclusive language check is applied only to reST files located under the documentation directory (usually docs). To check Markdown files, for example, or to use a location other than the docs sub-tree, you must change how the woke tool is invoked from within docs/Makefile (see the woke User Guide for help).

Inclusive language check exemptions

Some circumstances may require you to use some non-inclusive words. In such cases you will need to create check-exemptions for them.

This page provides an overview of two inclusive language check exemption methods for files written in reST format. See the woke documentation for full coverage.

Exempt a word

To exempt an individual word, place a custom none role (defined in the canonical-sphinx-extensions Sphinx extension) anywhere on the line containing the word in question. The role syntax is:

:none:`wokeignore:rule=<SOME_WORD>,`

For instance:

This is your text. The word in question is here: whitelist. More text. :none:`wokeignore:rule=whitelist,`

To exempt an element of a URL, it is recommended to use the standard reST method of placing links at the bottom of the page (or in a separate file). In this case, a comment line is placed immediately above the URL line. The comment syntax is:

.. wokeignore:rule=<SOME_WORD>

Here is an example where a URL element contains the string "master": wokeignore:rule=master,

.. LINKS
.. wokeignore:rule=master
.. _link definition: https://some-external-site.io/master/some-page.html

You can now refer to the label link definition_ in the body of the text.

Exempt an entire file

A more drastic solution is to make an exemption for the contents of an entire file. For example, to exempt file docs/foo/bar.rst add the following line to file .wokeignore:

foo/bar.rst

Configure the link check

If you have links in the documentation that you don't want to be checked (for example, because they are local links or give random errors even though they work), you can add them to the linkcheck_ignore variable in the custom_conf.py file.

Add redirects

You can add redirects to make sure existing links and bookmarks continue working when you move files around. To do so, specify the old and new paths in the redirects setting of the custom_conf.py file.

Other resources

• Example product documentation
• Example product documentation repository