Aiven Developer

This is the source for the Aiven developer documentation at https://developer.aiven.io. We are working to move all of our technical documentation to this platform, and welcome issues and pull requests from everyone.

It is Python-based, with content in ReStructuredText (rst) and rendered by Sphinx.

Contributing

Check the CONTRIBUTING guide for details on how to create content for Aiven Developer. You will find the style guide, pull request process and templates for the various content types there.

Local Development

We recommend using a virtual environment like venv:

python3 -m venv venv

Activate your virtual environment using the activate script for your environment:

source venv/bin/activate

Install the dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Start the HTML version with:

make livehtml

Your preview should be at http://localhost:8000 (if anything doesn't seem to re-render well, the navigation seems particularly unreliable, try make clean and then make livehtml again).

> If you are working on the templates, try the additional make livehtmlall command. This disables sphinx's incremental build and also observes changes to the assets, so it's slower but more like a full rebuild when things change.

Windows users

Replace all make commands with ./make - this uses the make.bat file instead of Makefile but the functionality should be equivalent.

Running build tasks locally

To run the spell check locally, you will need to have Vale installed on your computer and available on your path.

• Check links: make linkcheck
• Check spelling and usage: make spell

For documentation on how we use Vale, see our Vale README. This also explains how to add new words to the dictionary, or alter the things that Vale checks.

Installing Vale

The Vale installation page has instructions for all platforms including docker; this will be updated if the approach changes between versions.

On Fedora (F34), here's a tip for installing Vale (current version 2.16) (without a package manager) using the following::

package=$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/errata-ai/vale/releases/latest \
| jq -r ' .assets[] | select(.name | contains("Linux"))'); output=$(mktemp -d); \
echo $package | jq -r '.browser_download_url' | xargs curl -L --output-dir $output -O; \
echo $package | jq -r '.name' | sed -r "s#(.*)#$output/\1#g" | xargs cat \
| tar xzf - -C $output; cp -v $output/vale $HOME/bin

Then add $HOME/bin to $PATH (e.g. in .bashrc, where vale is downloaded to via the above command)

Alternatively, use snap or brew: https://vale.sh/docs/vale-cli/installation/

Navigation structure

The left-hand navigation menu is driven by a plugin called Sphinx external TOC. You can find our structure in _toc.yml.

Formatting tips

Here's an incomplete but helpful collection of tips for formatting your content on Aiven Developer.

Links

Links are different depending on whether they are external links, links pointing to a specific page on the site, or links pointing to a specific anchor or label.

External links are used for external hyperlinks:

`ReStructuredText <https://docutils.sourceforge.io/rst.html>`_

If you get the warning Duplicate target name, because of multiple links with the same label, see :doc:`Create anonymous links <docs/documentation/anonymus-links>`.

To link to another page on the site, use the :doc: role:

Use the :doc:`cli` for scriptable, repeatable actions with Aiven

The :doc: role uses the page title but if you want to change the link text, you can do so:

With an :doc:`API <api/index>` you can build any integration you choose

To create a label to link to a particular section (this is also useful if renaming titles that might have links pointing to the old wording), place the label immediately before the section heading:

.. _tools_cli_tips_tricks:

Tips and Tricks
===============

Then you can refer to the label with a :ref: entry:

There are some :ref:`_tools_cli_tips_tricks` to assist you.

Diagrams

Diagrams use sphinxcontrib-mermaid and mermaid.js syntax.

Sections and panels

We're using sphinx-panels for the card layout you see on the homepage and in a few other places. Please use sparingly :)

Code samples

Code samples should be autodetected (using pygments) and also will automatically include the "click to copy" button in the top right thanks to sphinx-copybutton.

Do not include a $ before a command that the user should run, because it will get copied into the user's clipboard and cause the command to fail (this has been a common standard in the past).

Importing content

Some of the content for DevPortal came from a previous incarnation of documentation. There is an import script to help with this process.

To set up the import tooling for the first time:

• Install pandoc and make sure the command is in your path
• Change into the utils/ directory
• Run pip install -r requirements.txt

To bring in a page from the previous platform:

• Run python import-help-article.py [paste a URL]
• Take the resulting *.rst file and any images, and place them as appropriate in the file structure of the project

Migration status

You can check the migration status from https://help.aiven.io/en articles to the https://developer.aiven.io/ articles by using the page_stats.py script available in this repository.

Install the dependencies:

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

To run the page_status.py script:

python page_stats.py

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.