Docs Site

This website is built using Docusaurus 2, a modern static website generator.

Overview

Docs Sourcer

All of the content that we see on the docs site is rendered to the top level docs/ folder by the docs-sourcer. docs-sourcer is a process which can pull content from our GitHub repos as well as pre-process the MarkDown files which comprise the docs site's manually authored content (in _docs-sources/). At present, docs-sourcer isn't augmenting the content all that much, but in the future, the idea is that docs-sourcer will be able to pull in tagged content from other files, located in other GitHub repos, pull in images and auto-correct links. This will allow content creators to have more features when authoring content.

Content creation

All manually created MarkDown source content lives in the _docs-sources/ folder. The top level docs/ folder contains the generated output that results after the docs-sourcer processes the _docs-sources/ directory. Grunts should never edit any of the MarkDown files in the docs/ folder directly. We should always be editing the content in _docs-sources/.

Installing dependencies

yarn

Local development

yarn start

This command starts a local development server and opens up a browser window. Most changes are reflected live without having to restart the server. This command also begins watching the _docs-sources directory for file changes. If you edit a file in _docs-sources/ then the docs-sourcer will automatically re-run to regenerate the output files. Docusaurus will then hot-reload that content so that to the end user, they have "live reloading" while authoring.

Committing changes

While authoring local content, you will exclusively be making your changes in the _docs-sources/ folder. The docs-sourcer will then pre-process and generate output for you. To get your content published you will need to commit both the "source" files in _docs-sources/ as well as the generated content in the top level docs/ folder.

Generated content should be up to date if you are previewing locally while editing but you may wish to manually regenerate the output (see section below) to ensure it is totally up to date.

Running a production build locally

yarn build && yarn serve

This will create and serve a production build. This can be used to verify the expected behaviors in a production environment and view the Google analytics.

Manually generating docs output

It's possible to manually regenerate output content from the sources in _docs-sources/:

yarn regenerate:local

This command can be run at any time, regardless of whether yarn start is currently running.

Generating sidebars for guides

We utilize explicit sidebar definitions for most of our docs content. Doing so enables authors to easily provide titles for all category labels, as well as define the relative ordering of pages in a maintainable way. Long-form docs with many sections receive a dedicated sidebar to provide a focused reading experience (e.g. /guides/build-it-yourself/*).

A tool is provided to automatically generate sidebars for any new guide. To run it, specify the path to the directory you wish to create a sidebar for in either _docs-sources/ or the output docs/ path, relative to your current working directory.

yarn sidebar docs/guides/build-it-yourself/my-new-guide/

Once generated, you're free to adjust the names of each category, which only appear in the sidebar itself. You may also reorder any of the linked pages within each section, which will be reflected in the rendered output.

See the usage instructions with yarn sidebar --help to learn how to add a back button or specify an output file. The resulting file should be placed in the sidebars/ directory. You'll also need to require this file in sidebars.js, and then re-run yarn start to see your changes.