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README.md

Mathesar's Documentation

This directory contains the source code for Mathesar's user and administrator documentation published to https://docs.mathesar.org/

Preview your documentation edits locally

  1. Install requirements

    pip install -r requirements.txt

  2. Start MkDocs

    mkdocs serve -a localhost:9000

  3. Preview the docs at http://localhost:9000

  4. Keep mkdocs running while you edit and your local preview will refresh automatically.

Contribution process

  • For small documentation improvements, we welcome PRs without any prior issues. For larger edits, please open an issue first to discuss your changes and get approval from the team before proceeding.

  • Take care when choosing the git branch on which to base your edits

    • Target master if you have an important fix which needs to be published for the currently-released version of Mathesar.
    • Target develop if you are adding/updating documentation along with yet-to-be-released changes to the product.

    The docs site is published from the master branch. This is important because we want to ensure that it reflects the latest released version of Mathesar so that docs readers who are installing or using Mathesar don't see content before it's actually applicable.

See our Contribution guidelines for more information about our pull-request workflow.

For docs content, we adhere to CiviCRM's Documentation Style Guide.

MkDocs Material

  • Our docs run on a distribution of mkdocs called mkdocs-material. For basics of doc writing, see the Writing your docs section of mkdocs user guide.

  • For some customization basics, see Customization section of mkdocs-material's Getting started guide. To learn about some of mkdocs-material's features (annotations, code blocks, content tabs, etc.), see its Reference.

Hosting

We use GitHub pages to host https://docs.mathesar.org/

Here's how this works:

  1. In our main Mathesar repo, there's a branch called gh-pages.
  2. The gh-pages branch is not like other branches though. It has nothing in common with develop or master. The files in that branch are static HTML files for the docs site.
  3. Whenever GitHub sees new commits pushed to that branch, a GitHub action publishes the content to the live docs site.

Publication process

Changes to documentation is published manually. This may change in the future.

Versioning

  • We use mike to publish docs for multiple versions of Mathesar.
  • Mike integrates with mkdocs-material to provide a version switcher within the site header.

How to publish a single version of Mathesar's docs

  1. Check out the git branch corresponding to the version you'd like to publish. For example:

    git checkout master

    As a convention, we use branches named like docs_1.2.3 to retain changes to documentation which are made after a specific release is tagged. So you may end up needing to check out (or even create) a branch like that.

  2. Go to the docs directory within the project root.

    cd docs

  3. Ensure you have the docs-related dependencies:

    pip install -r ./requirements.txt

    Note that these dependencies are different from the Mathesar application dependencies.

  4. Pull the gh-pages branch locally.

    git pull origin gh-pages:gh-pages

    Note that you don't need to checkout the gh-pages branch locally. This command just ensures that you have all the commits locally which have been made to that branch upstream.

  5. Run mike

    mike deploy -u 1.2.3 latest

    Modify before running:

    • Change 1.2.3 to the version you want to deploy.
    • Keep latest in the command to set the version to be the latest one. Remove that string from the command if you are publishing a non-latest version.

    What this does:

    • Despite the very public-sounding name "deploy" this command actually only makes a commit on the gh-pages branch locally. You're not "deploying" anything here.
    • To make that commit, mike will run mkdocs build against the files in your current directory.

  6. Preview the site

    mike serve

    This will let you open up a browser to preview the new site as GitHub will serve it from the gh-pages branch. You'll see the version switcher and be able to change it. However, it won't allow you to test our custom version redirection behavior (described below).

    If you're not satisfied, you can always hard-reset the commit you made with mike before pushing.

  7. Push your changes to GitHub

    git push origin gh-pages:gh-pages

  8. Monitor publication status

    Open the Actions tab in our GitHub repo and you should see a yellow indicator aside the top-most action. When this turns green, your changes are published and can be viewed on the live docs site.

Now to manage our custom version redirection behavior

We have some custom code in overrides/404.html which is pretty weird!

  • Here's the problem that code is intended to solve:

    At the time we switched to multi-version docs, Mathesar 0.1.7 (and several previous versions) had application code which rendered a hyperlink to the release notes of the latest stable release of Mathesar. This hyperlink was coded without any docs version path segments, so for example it would point to https://docs.mathesar.org/releases/0.1.7/. However, urls like that unfortunately don't resolve in a site built with mike because they don't point to a specific version. We can't change the hyperlink because it's in an already-released version of Mathesar, so we'd like to find a way of catching traffic to links like that. Our 404.html file is a somewhat hacky way of handling this problem.

  • Interestingly, the GitHub Pages server will handle Page Not Found errors by serving the content from a 404.html file if present in the root of the gh-pages branch. It's worth noting that this is a bit unconventional. Most web servers do not behave this way by default. Sean (who wrote our 404.html code) was not even easily able to identify a way to mimic this behavior locally. So it's hard to test without setting up a sandbox repo to be served by GitHub Pages.

  • MkDocs (and by extension, mkdocs-material) features an extensible templating system that we leverage to alter the 404.html page which gets generated when mkdocs runs. When we use mike to publish a version, we end up with our custom 404.html page published in the version subdirectory of the live site. But being published in a subdirectory actually accomplishes nothing by itself because the GitHub Pages server doesn't look for 404.html pages in subdirectories. So additionally we have a symlink at the root which points to latest/404.html. Since mike also maintains a symlink to point latest to the latest version, GitHub is able to see the custom 404 page at the site root.

  • Within 404.html we have some javascript. Here's how it works:

    1. It fetches the versions JSON blob that mike maintains.
    2. It checks the current URL to see if it contains a version specifier within the path.
    3. If the current URL has a version specifier, then it serves the 404 page.
    4. If the current URL has no version specifier, then the javascript code redirects to the same URL with latest prepended to the path.

How to manage our customizations applied to the version switcher

  • We have some customizations to the version switcher which are applied within the extra.css file.
  • If you modify this, you'll need to port those modifications to all published versions so that the user experience is consistent when switching between versions.

Spell-checking

We use the mkdocs-spellcheck plugin to spell-check our documentation.

  • CI will fail if there are any spelling errors.

  • To check for spelling errors locally, run:

    mkdocs build --strict

    Spelling errors will be reported as warnings when building in strict mode.

  • To configure ignored words, see the spellcheck section in mkdocs.yml and refer to the plugin docs as needed.

  • If you happen to be writing documentation content using VS Code, we recommend the Code Spell Checker extension (id: streetsidesoftware.code-spell-checker). It will highlight spelling errors in real-time as you type.

Page redirects

We use mkdocs-redirects to redirect pages internally when moving things around.

Macros

We use the macros plugin to show the same content in different places, and we generally put such content in the snippets directory.

Placeholders

We use the placeholder plugin to allow the user to customize small tokens which get repeated throughout a page. Here's how it works:

  1. Add a token like PLACEHOLDER_NAME in placeholder-plugin.yaml with a default value.

  2. Put an input on the page to allow the reader to customize the value of the token.

    <input data-input-for="PLACEHOLDER_NAME">

  3. Then put the customized value anywhere in the page

    xPLACEHOLDER_NAMEx