Documentation for developing with EdgeX-Docs

Local Development (docker) (recommended)

The most common use case for local development of edgex-docs will be to verify changes to the HTML. To facilitate docs verification you can run the following command:

make serve

Once running, you can view the rendered content locally and makes changes to your documentation and preview them in realtime with a browser at:
http://localhost:8008

If you only want to verify the documentation will build successfully you can run the following command:

make build

When done, you can clean up with:

make clean

Local Development (native)

In order to render and preview the site locally (without docker) you will need a few things to get started.

You will need to install python and pip
After python is installed, you'll need the following python dependencies:

pip install mkdocs pip install mkdocs-material==8.2.1

Once you have all the pre-reqs installed. You can simply run mkdocs serve and view the rendered content locally and makes changes to your documentation and preview them in realtime with a browser at http://0.0.0.0:8001/edgex-docs.

Checking for broken links when developing docs

To check that all the links in the documentation set are valid:

Install the htmlproofer plugin (native only):

Note: if using the docker method, this is already installed in the image
```
pip install mkdocs-htmlproofer-plugin
```
Export the ENABLED_HTMLPROOFER environment variable.

Note: This adds about 5 minutes each time a change is made, so it is recommended to do once all changes are ready.
```
export ENABLED_HTMLPROOFER=true
```
Run make build or make serve. Broken links will be listed at the end of the build process.

Warning: the check for invalid / broken links does take some time and will add significantly to the build and serve times.

"Publishing" your changes

Publishing is done by the jenkins pipeline. Once a PR is merged, the changes will be reflected on the documentation site, hosted under gh-pages branch and served by Github Pages.

The different versions of the documentation are maintained in separate branches. The main branch hosts the source files for the version that is under development as well as the following production site files:

docs/CNAME - DNS record which tells Github Pages to serve the content at https://docs.edgexfoundry.org instead of https://edgexfoundry.github.io/edgex-docs
docs/index.html - site index page that redirects from / to /{latest-release}
docs/versions.json - version info to populate the site version drop-down menu

The pipeline copies the files to separate directories inside gh-pages branch. For example, when the dev version is 2.2:

Source	Production
main/docs/CNAME	gh-pages/CNAME
main/docs/index.html	gh-pages/index.html
main/docs/versions.json	gh-pages/versions.json
main/docs_src/*	gh-pages/2.2/*
jakarta/docs_src/*	gh-pages/2.1/*
ireland/docs_src/*	gh-pages/2.0/*

Other files such as for CI checks and guidelines are also copied from all branches.

Versioning the docs

When a new version of EdgeX is released, we version the docs as well. There are four steps to make this happen:

Create a branch without production site files

i) Create a branch from main for the released documentation The branch name should be the new EdgeX release name. For example, for 2.2, a kamakura branch is created.

ii) Remove production site files from the branch, listed here. This is necessary to avoid overriding production files; see #680.
Add the version to be added to the docs/versions.json file. This file will populate the drop down in the site deployed at https://docs.edgexfoundry.org

[
    {"version": "1.1", "title": "1.1-Fuji", "aliases": []},
    {"version": "1.2", "title": "1.2-Geneva", "aliases": []}
    {"version": "[new version number here]", "title": "[name that is visible in the drop down]", "aliases": []}
]

The value placed in version property in the json above MUST match the name of the folder that contains the versioned content in the gh-pages branch. This is specified by updating the site_dir: property in the mkdocs.yml file:

site_name: EdgeX Foundry Documentation
docs_dir: ./docs_src
site_dir: ./docs/1.2 #UPDATE THE VERSION NUMBER HERE TO MATCH WHATS IN THE VERSION.JSON
site_description: 'Documentation for use of EdgeX Foundry'
site_author: 'Michael Johanson'
site_url: 'https://edgexfoundry.github.io/edgex-docs/'
repo_url: 'https://github.com/edgexfoundry/edgex-go'
repo_name: 'edgex/edgex-go'
copyright: 'Copyright &copy; 2020 EdgeX Foundry'
...

Once this is done and merged, the build job will place content in the specified folder in the gh-pages branch.

Update the docs/index.html to redirect from / to the most recent release directory. For example, if the latest release is 2.1: