Ably Documentation Overview
Ably is a hugely scalable, superfast and secure hosted realtime messaging service for web-enabled devices.
This Git repository contains most of the Ably API documentation that resides at https://www.ably.io/documentation in Textile format. Nanoc is used to build the static site from the master
branch.
The Ably documentation was intentionally created as a public repository using a simple text based markup language so that:
- It can be maintained by Ably staff and developers.
- 3rd parties can fork the repository, and submit pull requests to improve the documentation. We welcome the community's suggestions and input.
- This documentation is later merged upstream to the Ably primary website documentation with each website release.
Viewing the documentation
The static site generated from this documentation repository is hosted at http://docs.ably.io and deployed automatically when the master
branch is updated. We frequently publish updates from this repository so is typically more up to date than the official Ably API documentation.
The official complete Ably documentation that incoporates all the documentation in this repository can be found at https://www.ably.io/documentation
www.ably.io/documentation)
Deploying to website (The website consumes this repo through a ruby gem. The gem points at the master
branch and saves the revision as a version. To release to /documentation
, follow these steps:
- Check if the changes that are already on
master
in this repository are ok to be released - Merge your PR
- Clone the website repo
- Run
bundle update ably-docs
in the website repo - Check in
Gemfile.lock
that the SHA saved by the above command is the SHA of the commit you expected (in most cases this should be the merge/top commit of your PR) - Open PR & ask the website team to review
- Follow the deployment process for website (if in doubt, ask the website team for help)
Publishing to JSBin
This configuration is not required for basic documentation creation and modification, so most editors can simply skip to Forking and running locally.
If you will be creating or modifying code within this repository that is to be uploaded automatically to JSBin, for our "Try it now code editor", then you will need to create yourself a JSBin config file:
cp config/jsbin_config.example.yaml config/jsbin_config.yaml
And then you will need to populate the api_key
property in that file with a JSBin API key.
The creation of code content for JSBin is further documented in our document formatting guide which gets published here. The code that is published to JSBin can be found in content/code/.
Forking and running locally
- Fork the repository at https://github.com/ably/docs
- Clone a local version of your forked repo
git clone https://github.com/[you]/docs
andcd
into it - Checkout the master branch:
git checkout master
- Create your feature or fix branch and check it out:
git checkout -b [your-branch]
bundle install
to install the necessary gems, includingnanoc
At this point you can either run the repo directly on your machine or via Docker.
If you have Ruby and are comfortable working in a Ruby environment as follows:
bundle exec nanoc compile
to generate the site for the first timebundle exec nanoc view -p 4000
to start up a web server at http://localhost:4000bundle exec guard
to watch for changes and rebuild the site automatically. This is normally run in conjunction with thenanoc view -p 4000
command so that you can see changes immediately
If you would prefer to use Docker, then you can set up the env as follows:
./docker-run build
to build the initial Docker image./docker-run compile
to compile the HTML for the static site (this is a once off command)./docker-run server
to start up a web server at http://localhost:4000./docker-run guard
to watch for changes and rebuild the site automatically. This is normally run in conjunction with the./docker-run server
command so that you can see changes immediately
For those who use
ASDF
or compatible tooling to manage their Ruby runtime versions, we have included a
.tool-versions
file.
Running on Heroku
This repo will automatically run on Heroku, but relies on the following buildpacks (see https://github.com/ably-forks/heroku-buildpack-nanoc):
$ heroku buildpacks
=== ably-docs Buildpack URLs
1. https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby
2. https://github.com/ably-forks/heroku-buildpack-nanoc
3. https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-static
Pull requests
- Assuming you have followed the steps above, prior to making a PR, make your changes locally and they should be visible within seconds in the browser following a refresh (if using the
guard
command, else a manualcompile
is required). If the changes are not visible, check your console whereguard
is running for errors. - Commit your changes, push your branch and send us a pull request
- All pull requests will automatically launch a static review site that will be linked to at the bottom of the PR
Branch and tag scheme for features spec
The master
branch contains the most recent version of the spec, as
amended by any subsequent fixes and non-breaking improvements. This is
the version that a client library developer who is implementing a
feature now should use as a reference. It is also the version that is
deployed to docs.ably.io.
When proposing a spec change, changes that you would be happy to have
incorporated into the current version of client libraries should be made
against master
. Changes that should not be incorporated until the next
minor or major version should be made against the corresponding
integration/<major>.<minor>
branch, e.g. integration/1.2
(which ideally should
be regularly rebased on top of master
).
When a new minor or major version of the spec is released, it is tagged
with a tag such as v1.2
. Conformance to the spec at that tag is what
defines whether a library can be released with the a library version
with that major/minor version.
Client library developers are not expected to monitor the docs repo for
spec fixes that occur after the release tag. If a given spec fix needs
to be made to client libraries at that time, on merging the pr to
master
you should open a github issue in each individual client lib
repo to request that. If this is not done, it is not mandatory for the
fix to be incorporated until the next spec release.
When updating a client lib to a spec version, client lib devs should work from a diff from the tag of the previous release, so as to incorporate all changes since that tag.
Help and contact
If you have any questions or suggestions, please get in touch with us at Ably.