EMQX's document generation

This repo is to hold the generated schema artificats which are used as the source for documentation rendering.

Background

The main user interfaces to configure and manage EMQX are

• HTTP API (and on top of it, the web-based dashboard)
• Configuration files
• Command line interface

Starting from version 5, HTTP API and Configuration are developed with a unified schema to avoid repeating ourselves in:

• Input validation and translation
• Objects and fields documentation

What is this repo for

For documentation, since the underlying schema is shared, it is possible to auto-generate them. E.g. the types and descriptions of the objects and fileds.

However, there are certain parts of the doucment that are not possible to aut-generate. For example the lengthy in-general description to explain how the different configuration system works.

This repo, is created as an intermediate stop to hold the generated artifacts which includes:

• The JSON representation of the schema.
• The hand-crafted document contents, i.e. the parts of the document which do not make sense to be a part of emqx.git
• The final markdown generation scripts. For as long as the docs site is rendering the doc pages from markdown, we will continue to generate markdown.

In general this is the (second-stop) source of truth for downstream document generation or rendering. Meaning it is not a replacement for emqx-docs.git but the input of it.

Why isn't this made a part of emqx-docs.git.

The doc repo emqx-docs.git holds the raw material (most of which is hand-crafted markdown) for only on purpose: doc-site rendering.

This repo however, can hold the source of multiple downtreams, to name a few:

• EMQX configuration docs markdown generation.
• Multi-language translations (i18n). So far we only supprot 2 languages, the translations still in emqx.git. In future release, we'll keep only the english descriptions in the source code and move translations here.
• The OpenAPI 3.0 specification.
• With the canonical schema format (JSON) version controlled here, a future doc-rendering web server can make use of this source to render the pages in a whole different way.