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Contributing to Calico documentation

Overview

We welcome contributions to the Calico documentation.

Instead of filing a GitHub issue, consider making a PR instead. You are likely to see a much more rapid resolution.

The doc contribution process works as follows.

  1. Fork the Project Calico repo.
  2. Create a branch in your fork off of the master branch.
  3. Give your branch a short but descriptive name.
  4. Make your changes in the master folder.
  5. Build the site locally to make sure it renders as expected.
  6. Check for broken links.
  7. Submit a pull request (PR) against the master branch of the Project Calico repo.
  8. If you haven't already signed our contributer agreement, GitHub will prompt you to do so (required).
  9. Request a review from one or more Calico maintainers.
  10. After getting the approval of at least one Calico maintainer, we ask that you backport the changes in the master folder to the folders of the last two releases, if appropriate.
  11. Squash your commits.
  12. One of the doc repo maintainers will give the PR a final look and then merge it.
  13. The merge into master will kick off a new build of the live site. You should see your changes on the live site shortly after they are merged.

Note: For contributions that affect just one page, you can use the Edit this page buttons in the doc site. This allows you to skip a few steps in the process outlined above, but is suitable only for small contributions.

We also encourage you to review Doc site organization, Doc site architecture, Linking content, and RELEASING.md for additional information.

Building the doc site locally

We use GitHub Pages and Jekyll to serve and build our site. While there are several ways to build the site locally, we recommend using our Docker image and the Makefile in the root of the repo. These will allow you to build the site with a single command.

Prerequisite: Docker.

Navigate into the root of the repo and issue the following command from a terminal prompt.

make serve

Once the build completes, it returns a URL as the value of Server address:. Copy and paste this URL into your browser to view the site.

Note: To view the changes that you've made in the master branch, select nightly from the Version list box.

Pro tip: Jekyll can take a while to render every page. To speed up builds, a supplemental _config_dev.yml exists which excludes all directories except master. You can include it in your builds as follows jekyll serve --config _config.yml,_config_dev.yml. Alternatively, you can pass enable it in make using the following environment variable DEV=true make serve.

Checking for broken links

Prerequisite: Docker.

To check for broken links, navigate into the root of the repo and issue the following command from a terminal prompt.

make htmlproofer

The submission of a PR kicks off a continuous integration process which includes a make htmlproofer command. Any errors from htmlproofer will cause your PR to fail the continuous integration test, so it's best to run this locally before submitting your PR.

However, you can also run this after submitting your PR and experiencing an htmlproofer failure from the Semaphore job.

How to quickly apply changes in master to a previous release

Let's say there's a single commit that makes changes to the master directory which I want to apply to the v1.5 directory.

  1. Generate a diff. A sample command follows which stores the diff in a file called my-patch.diff.

    git diff f35c02fe73e6a64d187ee3f6e9298ca47ded91ab^1 f35c02fe73e6a64d187ee3f6e9298ca47ded91ab > my-patch.diff

  2. Apply the diff to the target version directory.

    git apply -p2 --directory=v1.5 my-patch.diff
    • -p2 strips off /master on the front of the paths.
    • --directory=v1.5 adds "v1.5" to the start of the paths.

  3. Inspect the results (git status, git diff, etc.) and commit.

Doc site organization

Overview

The docs (currently) are split into four main sections.

Introduction

Landing page for new users covering Calico's purpose and high-level topics.

Getting started

This should be where new users go. It includes quick-start guides, some basic tutorials to show off Calico's capabilities, and links to more advanced topics once users are comfortable with the basics.

Each orchestrator has a landing page that is targeted at people who are coming to see Calico for the first time. It's a transition from the "marketing" type material (why is Calico great) to some quick commands people can run to see it firsthand, and then funnels people off to the Usage section for more details.

Usage

This section contains task-based information. All top-level titles in this section should start with a gerund. Each topic should include why you want to perform the task, a goal, and a set of steps you can follow to achieve it.

Examples:

  • Configuring BGP peers
  • Enabling IP-in-IP in AWS
  • Troubleshooting Calico
  • Using calicoctl in a Kubernetes deployment
  • Configuring egress policy in Kubernetes

Do not include detailed description of components or tabulated configuration information in this section. This type of content should be located in the Reference section.

Reference

These docs contain complete reference information for Calico. If there's a configuration option you're looking for, it goes here in one of the per-component references. Not every option has a "how to" guide, but has enough description. The caveats and considerations when enabling options should be listed here.

Examples:

  • Fully tabulated configuration options per-component
  • calicoctl help text
  • Calico API schema reference (policy, ip pool, etcd)

Doc site architecture

The naming and layout of these navbars are stored in _data/$VERSION/navbars/*. Jekyll automatically stores information from the _data directory in an accessible variable called site.data. The top-level layout (_layout/docwithnav.html) will iterate through all the files in site.data[version].navbars to construct the sidebar based on which version is being viewed.

Note: Sidebar paths to index files (see next section) should end in a / in the yaml file. Sidebar paths to actual files should not end in a / in the yaml file.

URL structure is important. In order to create a top level splash page for a URL path, simply name the file index.md. See the following example:

URL Filepath
/getting-started/kubernetes/ /getting-started/kubernetes/index.md
/getting-started/kubernetes/troubleshooting /getting-started/kubernetes/troubleshooting.md

Linking content

All links should be absolute links. To link to versioned content, prefix all links with: {{site.baseurl}}/{{page.version}}/

Pro tip: page.version will be inherited from the default set in _config.yml for the current page's directory.

Releases

See RELEASING.md