chriscabral / chef-docs

All The Documentation

chef-docs

The source of the Chef Documentation, located at http://docs.opscode.com/

This README focuses on people who want to contribute to the Chef documentation.

Setting Up

First, read CONTRIBUTING.

Next, read the style guide: http://docs.opscode.com/style_guide.html

Sphinx is the authoring tool used by chef-docs: http://sphinx-doc.org/

Fork & Clone repo to your own account://

git clone https://github.com/opscode/chef-docs.git
# will take a while, repo is ~800MB

You may wish to use virtualenv & virtualenvwrapper (similar to rvm or rbenv), to isolate this Python environment from others, so start out like so:

mkvirtualenv chef-docs
workon chef-docs
echo chef-docs > .venv # personal preference, can hook into other control projects later

If you don't use this and want to install into your system Python, prepend this command with sudo:

pip install sphinx

Will install all the dependencies you should need.

Building Docs

There's a Makefile in the root of the repo, that should have the majority of the tasks you'll ever need.

Run:

make release

This will build all the documentation into HTML, and place it inside ./build/chef/. Open ./build/chef/index.html to view the rendered files locally.

The first time you run the build, it will probably take longer (5-10 min), as it has to generate every file from scratch.

This will also apply if you've run the make clean command, which effectively resets your working environment.

Subsequent runs of make release should be relatively fast, and you can use subsets named: master, all, server to build one part.

Editing

Edit any RST files as you would any other text file. Sphinx syntax reference can be found here: http://sphinx-doc.org/

Always make changes on a 'feature' branch in your own fork, so you can always merge back to master cleanly. Here's how this might look:

git pull origin master
git pull upstream master
git checkout --branch my_new_edit
# make changes to some file
make all
# open file(s) changed in a browser, validate success
git add <filename changed>
git commit
# enter a good commit message
git push origin my_new_edit

Once pushed, visit your repo on GitHub, and open a Pull Request against opscode/chef-docs:master.

License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

Questions?

Open an Issue and ask.