Event Store Documentation

This documentation is available at https://eventstore.com/docs. Pages are built with DocFX.

What follows is documentation for how to use and contribute to the Event Store documentation. If you’re planning to make updates or contributions then read on. Otherwise, head on over to the website.

Contributing to Event Store Documentation

The Event Store documentation consists of different components, and the documentation reflects this. Depending on what you want to contribute to, the process is different.

Conceptual Documentation

This is the bulk of documentation, and where you mostly likely want to contribute. It uses 'DocFX flavored Markdown'. It is similar to standard or GitHub Flavored Markdown, but adds features useful for documentation you can find details of here.

HTTP API Spec

In additions to conceptual docs on the HTTP API, the documentation includes an OpenAPI spec file that DocFX renders to HTML when building the site. Any contributions to that file are welcome, read the OpenAPI spec for more details on the format of that file.

Code Documentation

When DocFX builds the documentation it parses XML code comments and renders them as HTML. If you want to contribute to that documentation, then find instructions in the code base repository.

Documentation Theme

Finally, if you would like to improve the theme for the documentation site, then you can find its repository here.

Running DocFX Locally

It is possible to clone this repository, and build and serve using the command below, but components are missing, DocFX generates a couple of warnings about missing content, and uses the default theme.

To have everything you need to fully generate the site, clone the following repositories into the same parent directory as the documentation repository:

• The core code base, DocFX generates documentation from code comments
• The documentation template
• The Java application used in code samples
• The .NET application used in code examples

Optional:

• The eventstore.com website, which hosts the rendered documentation

You need the website for the top menu to work as on live. If you only need to preview the documentation locally, it is not needed.

Follow the instructions here to install DocFX and dependencies, then run the command below in the documentation directory to generate documentation from code comments:

docfx metadata docfx.json

And the command below to generate the rest of the site and serve:

docfx build docfx.json --serve

This builds the site to the /_site folder and serves it at http://localhost:8080.

Small Edits

1. Make changes (fix typos or grammar, improve wording etc).
2. Send a pull request!

New Pages and Sections

1. Create new pages and/or sections. Follow the Conventions below.
2. If you create a new section add an entry for it to the toc.md file. This file determines the order of sections in the navigation sidebar and helps DocFX build internal navigation.
3. Send a pull request!

Conventions

File Names

• File and directory names are all lowercase.
• Replace spaces with dashes.
• Markdown files take the .md extension.

Formatting and Typesetting

The content of our documentation has multiple authors. Formatting and style guidelines help maintain a consistent use of language throughout the docs.

• Acronyms and abbreviations: Use uppercase (e.g. API, HTTP, JVM)
• Brand names: Use correct typesetting (e.g. cURL, Event Store, JavaScript, .NET)
• Example code should not have a line length of more than 80 characters

Build for deployment build script

You can also use the build.sh file in this repository to do most of these steps for you, and then run the Jekyll eventstore.com site to serve the entire site, or docfx build docfx.json --serve to only serve the documentation.

Then to get docs changes to eventstore.com, create a new PR with the generated HTML files in the eventstore.com folder. Any changes made to this repository are not automatically deployed anywhere.