DocsApp for MODX

The DocsApp is a Slim application that serves up the MODX documentation from markdown format into a fully functional site.

Version-specific copies of the markdown documentation go into the /docs directory. Then point a webserver at the /public directory to browse the documentation.

Environment	Branch	Latest deployment status
Mirror (docs.modx.org)	master
Production (docs.modx.com)	master

Initial installation

1. Run a composer install in the root: composer install
2. Copy the default settings: cp .env-dev .env
3. Edit .env in your favorite file editor to fix the paths.
4. To run the latest version of the documentation (i.e. the version published on the modxorg/Docs repository), initialise the default documentation sources with php docs.php sources:init. To run a local clone of the documentation source, allowing you to immediately see your local changes inside the app, see custom sources below.
5. Point a webserver, running at least PHP 7.1, to the /public directory.
6. If you use apache, cp public/ht.access public/.htaccess and tweak (RewriteBase) as required. For nginx, set up the equivalent rewrites in your configuration.

Custom Sources

The app uses a command line utility to help with initialising and updating documentation. The configuration for the latest (production) version of that, is in /sources.dist.json.

To run the app with a different set documentation source, you can create a /sources.json file.

For example, create it like this to have a local source for 2.x and a separate upstream containing the 2.x from the official repository:

{
    "2.x": {
        "type": "local"
    },
    "upstream": {
        "type": "git",
        "url": "[email protected]:modxorg/Docs.git",
        "branch": "2.x"
    }
}

(Note that app treats "2.x" the same as "current", so to allow easy switching between versions in a local mirror, you'll want to call it something different. That's why in this example we called it "upstream")

Once you've done that, run php docs.php sources:init from the root of the project. (If you've run this previously, deleted the directories in the /docs/ directory first.) You should see output like this:

$ php docs.php sources:init
Found 2 documentation sources: 2.x, upstream
Initialising "2.x" (local)
Source 2.x is of type local, so you have to initialise it manually.

Initialising "upstream" (git)
Cloning [email protected]:modxorg/Docs.git on branch 2.x into docs directory upstream...
Cloning into 'upstream'...

If you see an error "Doc sources definition is missing or invalid JSON", make sure that your JSON is valid. Especially commas at the end of the last entries can be troublesome. You can validate the JSON structure with ajv-cli by running: ajv -s sources.schema.json -d sources.json -d sources.dist.json

The "upstream" version has been cloned, and you can keep that up-to-date easily now with php docs.php sources:update, but you still need to set up the local version of 2.x. You can add the files directly in a /docs/2.x/ directory, or you can symlink them in from elsewhere.

For this, you need to clone the modxorg/Docs repository, or better yet a fork of your own that you have commit access to. Where the directory is doesn't matter for the application - you could clone directly into /docs/, or you can clone it into a separate directory and set up a symlink.

Clone it like this:

$ git clone -b 2.x [email protected]:modxorg/Docs.git markdown
Cloning into 'markdown'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 202, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (202/202), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (104/104), done.
remote: Total 11978 (delta 110), reused 170 (delta 97), pack-reused 11776
Receiving objects: 100% (11978/11978), 4.01 MiB | 3.77 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (7924/7924), done.

Now you need to create a symlink to dynamically pull in the version from markdown directory to /docs/2.x/. On Linux/Mac, you can use this command (from the root of the project):

ln -s ../markdown docs/2.x

The first path is the target, and the second path is where the link should be. Because we use relative links and we placed markdown in the root of the project, the target first has to go up a directory.

Alternative: direct from fork

You can also use a /sources.json configuration like this to easily pull in from your own fork:

{
    "2.x": {
        "type": "git",
        "url": "[email protected]:YourUserName/Docs.git",
        "branch": "2.x"
    },
    "upstream": {
        "type": "git",
        "url": "[email protected]:modxorg/Docs.git",
        "branch": "2.x"
    }
}

This places your git repository in /docs/2.x/.

Keeping sources up-to-date

When you've set up sources with the "git" type, php docs.php sources:update will automatically pull in the latest changes. This uses a hard reset, removing any uncommitted changes, forcing the local version to take the state of the origin branch.

When using "local" source types, you need to keep things in sync manually.

Branches (for "type":"git")

When initializing sources as explained, only the specified branch is fetched to keep the download size small. To be able of checking out other branches from your origin, you can run the following git command in the docs/{version} directory, after which a git fetch will once again let you access other branches:

git config remote.origin.fetch "+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*"

Searching / Indexing

To run the search locally, you'll first need to create the search index. Run php docs.php index:init to create the empty SQLite database, and then php docs.php index:all to populate the index. This may take a while (for 2.x + 3.x official documentation, 20-40 minutes depending on computer speed) as that will scan all files in the documentation to index possible search terms, as well as historic contributors (if the source is a git repo) for each file.

For the language switch to work, you also need to index the translations with php docs.php index:translations.

These index actions are done automatically for changed files only (much faster!) as part of php docs.php sources:update. Typically you'd only need to run the full indexing the first time setting up a mirror or clone.

Building assets

From the public/template/ directory, first load the dependencies with npm install.

Then use npm run build:css to build the styles or npm run watch:css to watch for changes to the sass files in public/template/src/ and automatically build them.

Similarly, for the javascript and SVG sprites, you can use npm run build:js and npm run build:svg.

When preparing a patch for production, use npm run release which will build styles and scripts in production mode, slimming down the file sizes further.

Running in a Docker Container

Run make and make install or use the provided Dockerfile/docker-compose.yml. (see #3)