/chef-web-docs

All The Documentation

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chef-web-docs

This repo is the source of the Chef reference documentation located at https://docs.chef.io/

Documentation for Other Repositories

We use Hugo modules to grab documentation from other Chef repositories.

The Chef Workstation documentation is stored in the chef/chef-workstation repository in the www directory.

The Chef Effortless documentation is stored in the chef/effortless repository in the effortless-chef-io directory.

The Chef Desktop documentation is stored in the chef/desktop-config repository in the docs directory. This is a private repository.

The Chef InSpec documentation is stored in the inspec/inspec repository in the www directory.

The Chef Automate documentation is stored in the chef/automate repository in the components/docs-chef-io directory.

Preview Local Changes to Documentation from Other Repos from chef-web-docs

Follow these steps to preview changes to the chef-workstation documentation while running Hugo from chef-web-docs.

  1. Clone chef/chef-web-docs and chef/other-repo-with-docs into the same directory.

  2. Modify the go.mod file in chef-web-docs.

    Add a replace directive to the go.mod file that points that repo to your local copy of the repo. For example, if you want to preview changes to chef-workstation, add replace github.com/chef/chef-workstation/www => ../chef-workstation/www below the require statement. The whole file should look something like this:

    module github.com/chef/chef-web-docs

go 1.14

require (
  github.com/chef/automate/components/docs-chef-io v0.0.0-<commit timestamp>-<commit SHA> // indirect
  github.com/chef/chef-workstation/www v0.0.0-<commit timestamp>-<commit SHA> // indirect
  github.com/chef/desktop-config/docs v0.0.0-<commit timestamp>-<commit SHA> // indirect
  github.com/chef/effortless/effortless-chef-io v0.0.0-<commit timestamp>-<commit SHA> // indirect
  github.com/inspec/inspec/www v0.0.0-<commit timestamp>-<commit SHA> // indirect
)

replace github.com/chef/chef-workstation/www => ../chef-workstation/www

  3. Start the Hugo server from chef-web-docs:

    make serve_ignore_vendor

You can preview any changes made to the documentation in chef-workstation as they would appear on https://docs.chef.io.

See the documentation about Hugo vendoring below to understand the --ignoreVendor option.

Before you submit a PR

  • Delete or comment out the replace directive in the chef-web-docs/go.mod file.

Update Hugo Modules

Hugo modules are pinned to a particular commit of the master branch in their repository. If you look in the go.mod and go.sum files, you'll notice that each repository specifies a git commit timestamp and SHA.

To update a particular repo, run:

hugo mod get github.com/chef/repo_to_update/subdirectory
hugo mod tidy

For example, to update the chef-workstation repository:

hugo mod get github.com/chef/chef-workstation/www
hugo mod tidy

This will update that repository to the most recent commit.

You can also update a module to a commit version number. For example:

hugo mod get github.com/chef/chef-workstation/www@20.6.62
hugo mod tidy

To update all Hugo modules at the same time, run:

hugo mod get -u
hugo mod tidy

The hugo mod tidy command removes references to commits in the go.mod and go.sum files that are no longer relevant.

Sometimes the go.sum file gets a little out of control and hugo mod tidy won't clean it up. Each repository listed in the go.mod file should have two lines in the go.sum file. If it has more than that and hugo mod tidy doesn't remove them, delete the go.sum file and rebuild it with hugo mod get -u.

See Hugo's documentation for additional information about updating Hugo Modules.

go.sum File

The go.sum file should reference only one commit for each repository that is added as a module to chef-web-docs. Each module and commit in the go.sum file will take two or three lines. For example, the chef/chef-workstation repository documentation will look like this:

github.com/chef/chef-workstation/www v0.0.0-20200625161326-f43898a8e6c0 h1:MTVSgikrlIqceXki6uVwbf+iCVPwkpxsh1ERseRG31g=
github.com/chef/chef-workstation/www v0.0.0-20200625161326-f43898a8e6c0/go.mod h1:rktT78z3KaWu7A+wf1g6KmYszrwn6Y3o3IFlTg8OpQg=

If there are references to older commits, delete those lines.

The hugo mod tidy command should remove those lines, but sometimes it doesn't.

The commit SHA and timestamp in the go.sum file should match the SHA and timestamp in the go.mod file.

What If Hugo Doesn't Want to Update a Module

Sometimes Hugo gets a bit difficult and won't update a module cleanly or will leave references to older commits of a module in the go.sum file. In those cases, I give you the nuclear option. Re-initialize the modules:

  1. Delete the go.mod and go.sum files.
  2. Re-initialize the Hugo modules, hugo mod init github.com/chef/chef-web-docs This will generate a new, blank go.mod file.
  3. Update the references to the other GitHub repositories, hugo mod get -u.
  4. The previous step will update all modules to the latest commit of their source repositories. If you don't want that, look at the git history of those files and manually edit the go.mod and go.sum files to keep the older commits for the modules that you don't want to update.
  5. Run hugo mod tidy. This probably won't do anything on newly initialized go.mod and go.sum files, but it can't hurt either.
  6. Vendor the modules in chef-web-docs, hugo mod vendor.

Hugo Vendoring

Vendoring stores all of the module content from other repositories in the _vendor directory at the commit specified by the go.mod file. When Hugo builds the documentation, it will grab content from the _vendor directory instead of the original repository OR a local copy of a that repository. To see which commits the vendored files reference, see the _vendor/modules.txt file.

To vendor the modules in chef-web-docs, run hugo mod vendor.

To update the vendored modules, first update the Hugo module(s) (see above), then run hugo mod vendor.

To ignore the vendored files in a Hugo build, run make serve_ignore_vendor. This is the same as make serve except it adds the --ignoreVendor flag. This will build the documentation from the GitHub repositories or from a local copy of a repository if the go.mod file specifies pulling content from a local repository. (see above)

The fastest way to contribute

The fastest way to change the documentation is to edit a page on the GitHub website using the GitHub UI.

To perform edits using the GitHub UI, click on the [edit on GitHub] link at the top of the page that you want to edit. The link takes you to that topic's GitHub page. In GitHub, click on the pencil icon and make your changes. You can preview how they'll look right on the page ("Preview Changes" tab).

We also require contributors to include their DCO signoff in the comment section of every pull request, except for obvious fixes. You can add your DCO signoff to the comments by including Signed-off-by:, followed by your name and email address, like this:

Signed-off-by: Julia Child <juliachild@chef.io>

See our blog post for more information about the DCO and why we require it.

After you've added your DCO signoff, add a comment about your proposed change, then click on the "Propose file change" button at the bottom of the page and confirm your pull request. The CI system will do some checks and add a comment to your PR with the results.

The Chef docs team can normally merge pull requests within seven days. We'll fix build errors before we merge, so you don't have to worry about passing all of the CI checks, but it might add an extra few days. The important part is submitting your change.

Local Development Environment

The Chef Documentation website is built using:

  • Hugo 0.61 or higher
  • Node 10.0.0 or higher
  • NPM 5.6.0 or higher
  • Go 1.12 or higher

To install Hugo, NPM, and Go on Windows and macOS:

  • On macOS run: brew install hugo node go
  • On Windows run: choco install hugo nodejs golang

To install Hugo on Ubuntu, run:

  • apt install -y build-essential
  • snap install node --classic --channel=12
  • snap install hugo --channel=extended

To build the docs and preview locally:

Note that this repository grabs content from other repositories using Hugo modules. That content is stored in the _vendor directory. make serve will use the content in the _vendor directory instead of from its source GitHub repository OR from a local copy of a repository.

To build the docs from the source repositories:

  • Run make serve_ignore_vendor

Some of our documentation is stored in a private repository so this option is only available to people with access to that repository. See the documentation above concerning Hugo modules and vendoring.

To clean your local development environment:

  • Running make clean will delete the sass files, javascript, and fonts. These will be rebuilt the next time you run make serve.

  • Running make clean_all will delete the node modules used to build this site in addition to the functions of make clean described above. Those node modules will be reinstalled the next time you run make serve.

Hugo uses Goldmark which is a superset of Markdown that includes GitHub styled tables, task lists, and definition lists.

Shortcodes

Shortcodes are simple snippets of code that can be used to modify a Markdown page by adding content or changing the appearance of content in a page. See Hugo's shortcode documentation for general information about shortcodes.

We primarily use shortcodes in two ways:

  • adding reusable text
  • highlighting blocks of text in notes or warnings to warn users or provide additional important information

Adding reusable text

There are often cases where we want to maintain blocks of text that are identical from one page to the next. In those cases, we add that text, formatted in Markdown, to a shortcode file located in chef-web-docs/themes/docs-new/layouts/shortcodes.

To add that shortcode to a page in chef-web-docs/content, add the file name, minus the .md suffix, wrapped in double curly braces and percent symbols to the location in the Markdown page where you want that text included. For example, if you want to add the text in shortcode_file_name.md to a page, add {{% shortcode_file_name %}} to the text of that page and it will appear when Hugo rebuilds the documentation.

Shortcodes in lists

Hugo doesn't handle shortcodes that are indented in a list item properly. It interprets the text of the shortcode as a code block. More complicated shortcodes with code blocks, notes, additional list items, or other formatting look pretty bad. We've created a simple shortcode for handling shortcodes in lists or definition lists called readFile_shortcode.

To include a shortcode in a list or definition list, just add its file name to the file parameter of readFile_shortcode.

For example, if you wanted to add shortcode_file_name.md to a list:

1.  Here is some text introducing the shortcode, but it's not necessary.

    {{< readFile_shortcode file="shortcode_file_name.md" >}}

Highlighting blocks of text

We also use shortcodes to highlight text in notes, warnings or danger notices. These should be used sparingly especially danger notices or warnings. Wrap text that you want in a note using opening and closing shortcode notation. For example,

{{< note >}}

Note text that gives the user additional important information.

{{< /note >}}

To add a warning or danger, replace the word note with warning or danger in the example above.

Notes in lists

Hugo doesn't handle shortcodes that are indented in lists very well, that includes the Note, Warning, and Danger shortcodes. It interprets the indented text that's inside the Note as a code block when it should be interpreted as Markdown.

To resolve this problem, there's a spaces parameter that can be added to the Note, Warning, and Danger shortcodes. The value of spaces should be set to the number of spaces that the note is indented.

For example:

This is a list:

- List item.

    {{< note spaces=4 >}}

    Text that gives the user additional important information about that list item.

    {{< /note >}}

This parameter also works on Danger and Warning shortcodes.

Release Notes

Release notes are added to release notes pages using Javascript and content from https://omnitruck.chef.io and https://packages.chef.io.

Chef Automate release versions, release dates, and links to release note Markdown files comes from https://packages.chef.io/releases/current/automate.json.

Release versions for all other Chef products come from https://omnitruck.chef.io/stable//versions/all.

Each release note page comes from a Markdown file from https://packages.chef.io/release-notes//.md

If a release note Markdown file is not returned from packages.chef.io, the release note page will show the text "This release does not have any release notes."

Adding Release Notes

To add release notes to a page, add release_notes = "<PRODUCT>" to the page front matter. For example, release_notes = "inspec".

This will overwrite all content on that page.

Sending feedback

We love getting feedback. You can use:

  • Email --- Send an email to docs@chef.io for documentation bugs, ideas, thoughts, and suggestions. This email address is not a support email address, however. If you need support, contact Chef support.
  • Pull request --- Submit a PR to this repo using either of the two methods described above.
  • GitHub issues --- Use the https://github.com/chef/chef/issues page for issues specific to Chef Infra itself. This is a good place for "important" documentation bugs that may need visibility among a larger group, especially in situations where a doc bug may also surface a product bug. You can also use chef-web-docs issues, especially for docs feature requests and minor docs bugs.
  • https://discourse.chef.io/ --- This is a great place to interact with Chef and others.

Documentation snapshots

The previous scoped doc sets that were found off of https://docs.chef.io/release/ are no longer available in this repo. Instead, those doc sets are located at https://docs-archive.chef.io/. The index page on the docs archive site provides links to them. The doc sets retain their unique left nav and can be used to view content at a particular point in time for a given release. In the future, snapshots will be added for major releases of products/projects or for products/projects/components that are no longer supported.

Archive of pre-2016 commit history

The commit history of this repo before February 12, 2016 has been archived to the chef-web-docs-2016 repo to save space. No changes to the archive repo will be merged; it's just for historical purposes.

Questions

If you need tips for making contributions to our docs, check out the instructions.

If you see an error, open an issue or submit a pull request.

If you have a question, send an email to docs@chef.io.