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Miller docs

Why use Mkdocs

  • Connects to https://miller.readthedocs.io so people can get their docmods onto the web instead of the self-hosted https://johnkerl.org/miller/doc. Thanks to @pabloab for the great advice!
  • More standard look and feel -- lots of people use readthedocs for other things so this should feel familiar.
  • We get a Search feature for free.
  • Mkdocs vs Sphinx: these are similar tools, but I find that I more easily get better desktop+mobile formatting using Mkdocs.

Contributing

  • You need pip install mkdocs (or pip3 install mkdocs) as well as pip install mkdocs-material.
  • The docs include lots of live code examples which will be invoked using mlr which must be somewhere in your $PATH.
  • Clone https://github.com/johnkerl/miller and cd into docs/ within your clone.
  • Overview of flow:
    • docs/src has *.md.in files containing markdown as well as directives for auto-generating code samples.
    • A genmds script reads docs/src/*.md.in and writes docs/src/*.md.
    • The mkdocs build tools reads docs/src/*.md and writes HTML files in docs/site.
    • Running make within the docs directory handles both of those steps.
    • TL;DR just make docs from the Miller base directory
  • Quick-editing loop:
    • In one terminal, cd to the docs directory and leave mkdocs serve running.
    • In another terminal, cd to the docs/src subdirectory and edit *.md.in.
    • Run genmds to re-create all the *.md files, or genmds foo.md.in to just re-create the foo.md.in file you just edited, or (simplest) just make within the docs/src subdirectory.
    • In your browser, visit http://127.0.0.1:8000
    • This doesn't write HTML in docs/site; HTML is served up directly in the browser -- this is nice for previewing interactive edits.
  • For-publish editing loop:
    • cd to the src subdirectory of docs and edit *.md.in.
    • make -C ..
    • This does write HTML in docs/site.
    • In your browser, visit file:///your/path/to/miller/docs/site/index.html
    • Link-checking:
      • sudo pip3 install git+https://github.com/linkchecker/linkchecker.git
      • cd site and linkchecker .
  • Submitting:
    • Do the for-publish editing steps -- in particular, docs/src/*.md.in and docs/src/*.md are both checked in to source control.
      • TL;DR edit docs/src/foo.md.in and run make docs
      • If you don't want to do pip install mkdocs then feel free to put up a PR which edits a foo.md.in as well as its foo.md.
    • git add your modified files (*.md.in as well as *.md), git commit, git push`, and submit a PR at https://github.com/johnkerl/miller.

Notes

  • Miller documents use the Oxford comma: not red, yellow and green, but rather red, yellow, and green.
  • CSS:
    • I used the Mkdocs "material" theme which I like a lot. I customized docs/src/extra.css for Miller coloring/branding.
  • Live code:
    • I didn't find a way to include non-Python live-code examples within Mkdocs so I adapted the pre-Mkdocs Miller-doc strategy which is to have a generator script read a template file (here, foo.md.in), run the marked lines, and generate the output file (foo.md). This is genmds.
    • Edit the *.md.in files, not *.md directly.
    • Within the *.md.in files are lines like GENMD_RUN_COMMAND. These will be run, and their output included, by genmds which calls the genmds script for you.
  • readthedocs:

readthedocs website