README.md

This repo contains the React/Gatsby application that powers the EDB Docs website. The site pulls Markdown content from several repos in a process called "sourcing", and then renders it all into high-performance markup. You can install the application on your local computer for easy editing, viewing, and eventually publishing to the GitHub repo.

Please remove and re-clone your local repositories after August 13, 2021

We've been checking PDF files into Git. That's not a good plan, so we've stopped doing that. The next step is to remove these files from Git history and move other large files to LFS. Among many other good things, that ought to reduce the time to clone this repository substantially.

But it comes at a cost. If there are any local repositories that were cloned before the change, we risk introducing dirty history back into the repository. So we're asking that everyone who has a local repository they cloned before (or on) August 13, 2021 to delete those repositories. Unfortunately, we'll need to reject any pull requests that introduce PDF files back into Git history. (If you need any help with this, please contact [email protected].)

MacOS Installation

We recommend using MacOS to work with the EDB Docs application.

1. Install Homebrew, if it's not already installed. (Use brew -v to check.)

2. Install Git using Homebrew with brew install git, if it's not already installed. (Use git --version to check.)

3. Set up an SSH key in GitHub, if you haven't done so already. (Go to GitHub's SSH Keys page to check.) If you don't have an SSH Key set up yet, you'll need to set one up to authenticate you to GitHub. See GitHub's SSH docs for more information.

4. Clone the EDB Docs GitHub repo to your local machine using GitHub Desktop, or via the Terminal with git clone https://github.com/EnterpriseDB/docs.git

5. Navigate to the cloned repo directory in your Terminal, if you haven't already done so.

6. Create a .env file: cp env .env.development.

7. Install Node.js version 14 LTS. We recommend using Node version 14 LTS (the Long Term Support release) as version 15 is not compatible with some of our dependencies at this time.

   • If you already have Node installed, you can verify your version by running node -v in the cloned repo directory.

   • If you already have a different version of Node installed, you may want to consider using Node Version Manager (NVM) for a simpler way to manage multiple versions of Node.js. Follow the directions to install NVM, then run nvm install in the cloned repo directory, followed by nvm use which will auto-detect the correct version of Node.js to use (currently 14 LTS).

8. Install Python 3 with brew install python3, if it's not already installed. (Use python3 -V to check that you have version 3.8 or higher.) Python is not needed for the core Gatsby system, but is required by several source scripts.

9. Install Yarn with npm i -g yarn. Yarn is the package manager we're using for this project, instead of NPM. NPM may fail with a permissions related issue. To fix that, ensure that your user account owns the required directory: sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/lib/node_modules

10. Install Gatsby with npm i -g gatsby-cli. Gatsby is the software that powers the EDB Docs site.

11. Install all required packages by running yarn.

12. And finally, you can start up the site locally with yarn develop, which should make it live at http://localhost:8000/. Huzzah!

Building Local PDFs (optional)

To build PDFs locally, you'll need to use a Docker container.

1. Install Docker using Homebrew:

   brew install --cask docker

   If you get a message saying that you already have Docker installed, check which version is installed using these commands:

   brew ls --formula docker
   brew ls --cask docker

   If the first command yields results, enter the following command to uninstall the formula version and to install the cask version:

   brew uninstall -f docker && brew install --cask docker

2. Start the Docker app. You can tell whether Docker has started or not by looking at your menu bar icons, you should see a whale with containers on its back:

   

3. Create the Docker image (optional):

   docker-compose -f docker/docker-compose.build-pdf.yaml build --pull

4. Run the following command inside the docs project to create a PDF:

   yarn build-pdf product_docs/docs/<product_folder>/<version>

   For example, to build a PDF for the EPAS 13 documentation:

   yarn build-pdf product_docs/docs/epas/13

Converting RST to MDX (optional)

If you need to run parts of the RST to MDX conversion pipeline, you'll need to install pandoc, a general purpose document conversion tool. This can also be installed with homebrew - brew install pandoc.

Windows Installation

If you are a Windows user, you can work with Docs without installing it locally by using a Docker container and VSCode. See Working on Docs in a Docker container using VSCode

Sources

• Advocacy (/advocacy_docs, always loaded)

• EDB Product Docs (/product_docs)

  • For a list of these sources, see product_docs/docs

Configuring Which Sources are Loaded

By default, all document sources will be loaded into the app during development. It's possible to set up a configuration file, dev-sources.json, to only load specific sources, but this is not required.

yarn config-sources

Run yarn config-sources to setup your dev-sources.json file. This file tells Gatsby which sources to load. The script is interactive!

Alternatively, you can setup your dev-sources.json file manually by copying dev-sources.sample to dev-sources.json, and editing as desired. The sample file will source everything by default.

Types of Sources

Advocacy Docs are tutorial content, getting-started material, and anything that is about a subject matter area, but not explicitly tied to a product version.

Product Docs are versioned documentation for products. They follow a slightly stricter file structure to allow for version switching and other features.

More details can be found on the Adding New Sources page.

Adding New Sources

See Adding New Sources for a guide to choosing a source type, adding the files, and other configuration.

Resolving issues

If you experience errors or other issues with the site, try the following in the project folder:

1. rm -rf node_modules to clean out installed JavaScript packages
2. yarn to reinstall JavaScript packages
3. yarn clean to clean up Gatsby cache
4. yarn develop to start the development environment again. Keep in mind this will take longer than usual as Gatsby will need to rebuild everything.

Development

All changes should have a pull request opened against the default branch, develop. To generate [#draft-deployments](Draft deployments) for the branch, add the deploy label to the pull request: a new deployment at a unique URL will be produced every time changes are pushed to the branch. Note: GitHub must be able to merge the branch cleanly in order for this to work; if there are conflicts shown on the pull request, resolve them in order to obtain a new draft deployment.

When a PR is merged into the develop branch, the result will be deployed to the staging environment.

To deploy to production, create a pull request merging develop into main. When that PR is merged, main will automatically build and deploy to the production site.

Environment Details

Deployments of the site use the build-sources.json file to determine which sources need to be loaded. All environments are continuously deployed - new commits to relevant branches will trigger a build of the associated environment. The builds are done using Github Actions, so you can view deployment progress by clicking the "Actions" tab.

Staging

Staging is hosted on Netlify, and is built from the develop branch. The build and deployment process is handled by the deploy-develop.yml GitHub workflow.

Staging environment URL: https://edb-docs-staging.netlify.app/docs/

Production

Production is hosted on Netlify, and is built from the main branch. The build and deployment process is handled by the deploy-main.yml GitHub workflow. The production deployment process will update the search index on Algolia.

Production environment URL: https://www.enterprisedb.com/docs

Draft deployments

Review builds are automatically created for pull requests when the deploy tag is added. The build and deployment process is handled by the deploy-draft.yml GitHub workflow. Draft builds are a Netlify feature - each new draft has a unique URL (based on the Staging URL) that will persist even when later revisions are deployed.

Redirects

The app is concerned with two different types of redirects that can be defined in frontmatter.

Internal Redirects (within Docs 2.0)

redirects

The redirects frontmatter is to be used for redirects internal to Docs. For example, if you had a file great_file.mdx with this following frontmatter...

redirects:
  - "/old_path"
  - "/another_old_path"

both /old_path and /another_old_path would redirect to great_file.mdx's current path. This is perfect for setting up redirects when moving a file around within Docs. Redirects created with redirects are permanent (301).

Docs 1.0 to Docs 2.0 redirects

This app builds a list of nginx style redirects that are loaded into a separate server. These redirects direct users from links to the old docs site, to the appropriate page on the new docs site.

legacyRedirectsGenerated

This frontmatter is an automatically generated list of redirects for Docs 1.0 to Docs 2.0 (this repo). These redirects are built by scripts/legacy_redirects/add_legecy_redirects.py, and should not be manually edited.

legacyRedirects

If you need to setup a redirect from Docs 1.0 to Docs 2.0 manually, this is the place to do it. If the legacyRedirectsGenerated frontmatter does not include the redirect you need, you should add it here.

MDX Format

Documentation must be formatted as an MDX file with the .mdx extension. MDX is a superset of Markdown.

Frontmatter

Each document requires a YAML frontmatter section at the top with a title:

---
title: Title of page
---

If the title contains special characters, it will need to be quoted. There also needs to be a space after title:

In addition to title, frontmatter may optionally include navTitle and description:

---
title: An exhaustive guide to all things wonderful about Postgres
navTitle: Postgres guide
description: Everything you need to know about Postgres
---

The navTitle is used for the left navigation so it can take up less space. It is also used in "cards".

The description is used in cards as well.

Markdown styling

All of these files use Markdown for styling. The options for what can be done can be seen here

Admonitions (Notes, Warnings, etc.)

If you need to draw attention to information, consider using an admonition:

!!! Note Optional title
    This is text you'd like the reader to notice.

Admonitions begin with the !!! signifier. Next comes a (case-insensitive) type which is one of:

• important
• tip
• note
• caution
• warning

There are several aliases:

• info => important
• success => tip
• secondary => note
• danger => warning
• seealso => note
• hint => tip

Titles are optional. If you don't include one, the admonition will default to the type name ("Important", "Tip", etc.).

The body of the admonition is indented 4 spaces. It should line up with the first letter of the admonition type. Alternatively, fenced admonitions that begin and end with !!! lines are supported:

!!! Tip
Use fenced admonitions to avoid space counting.
!!!

For examples of what you can do with admonitions, see this demo.

Ordering of files

The items in the left nav are sorted alphabetically by file name. This can be done with a numerical prefix. The titles of each page are used for the names in the left nav.

Search

Content is indexed for search when the production site builds.

Contributions

We love feedback!

To contribute content to this site submit as a pull request (PR). There are two options for this:

Option 1: locally

1. Clone this repository.
2. Make a new branch.
3. Add commits to branch and push to GitHub.
4. Create a new PR on GitHub.

Option 2: on GitHub

1. Edit a file on GitHub.
2. Submit changes as a PR on a new branch.