Pulumi Documentation Site

Staging	Production

Contributing

Before adding new content, read CONTRIBUTING.md.

Toolchain

The website is statically built using Hugo. So we have basic templating for generating HTML and the ability to write most files in Markdown.

TypeScript documentation is generated directly from source using TYPEDOC. We just check the resulting files directly into the repo under ./content/reference/pkg/nodejs.

Development

Prerequisites

Hugo

The website is powered by Hugo.

IMPORTANT. Recent versions of Hugo have bugs in the markdown renderer (Blackfriday) that prevents fenced code from rendering correctly in lists when a language is specified. Many of our tutorials are made up of ordered lists of steps, each step containing a code snippet. Until those bugs are fixed, and Hugo has adopted the version of Blackfriday with the fixes, we'll pin to Hugo v0.55.4. Tracking issue: pulumi#1091

If you already have Hugo installed, uninstall it:

brew uninstall hugo

Install Hugo v0.55.4:

brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/cf3219506fd28f7133041b74761e8025418435a3/Formula/hugo.rb

To prevent brew from upgrading Hugo:

brew pin hugo

Go and Tools

There are several other Go-based tools to install as well.

brew install go
go get -u github.com/cbroglie/mustache
go get -u github.com/gobuffalo/packr

Makefile

make build will generate the website (published to public).

make serve will build the website and serve it to http://localhost:1313.

make test runs a broken link checker tool against http://localhost:1313.

make generate will regenerate the TypeScript documentation if needed, as well as the CLI documentation in content/references/cli. The generated API documentation is placed in the [/content/reference/pkg/nodejs]/content/reference/pkg/nodejs) folder. This is extremely hacky.

The following repos must be peers of docs, should be checked out to an appropriate branch, and should be built before running make generate:

pulumi
pulumi-aws
pulumi-azure
pulumi-cloud
pulumi-gcp
pulumi-kubernetes
etc.

Updating API docs

to update API docs for all Pulumi packages, run the following commands to fetch latest release of each package and rebuild docs into .content/reference/pkg folder:

./scripts/update_repos.sh
./scripts/run_typedoc.sh

To update a single package, make sure you have it checked out at the desired release label, and then run:

PKGS=yourpackagename ./scripts/run_typedoc.sh

Docs for additional packages can be added by updating ./scripts/run_typedoc.sh to include the package, and then updating ./config.toml to include the package in the TOC as a [[menu.reference]] entry.

Deploying updates

When changes are merged into master our staging website (https://staging.pulumi.io/) is automatically deployed. You can use the Travis UI to check on the status of the deployment. Once it has been deployed, browse around the staging website and ensure the changes you expected were made and render correctly. Then, open a Pull Request to merge master into production.

Design Reference

Web design is hard. Documentation is hard. Good web design for documentation is harder.

Examples of other sites and their docs as inspiration:

Creating Shortlinks

Shortlinks can be created as a permanent reference to documentation that may move around in the repo. This is particularly useful for troubleshooting links that are produced by CLI tools.

To create a shortlink, create a file under /shortlinks in the following format:

---
redirect_to: <link-to-current-docs-page>
permalink: <unique-6-character-shortlink>/
---

You can use the scripts/create_short_url.sh script to generate a new random shortlink:

./scripts/create_short_url.sh /reference/troubleshooting#ingress-status-loadbalancer ingress-status-loadbalancer

Created shortlink definition at <filepath>/ingress-status-loadbalancer.md
https://pulumi.io/xdv72s --> https://pulumi.io/reference/troubleshooting#ingress-status-loadbalancer

or you can choose a shortlink:

./scripts/create_short_url.sh /reference/troubleshooting#ingress-status-loadbalancer ingress-status-loadbalancer help/ingress-lbstaus


Created shortlink definition at <filepath>/ingress-status-loadbalancer.md
https://pulumi.io/help/ingress-lbstatus --> https://pulumi.io/reference/troubleshooting#ingress-status-loadbalancer

Here is a concrete example:

---
redirect_to: /reference/troubleshooting.html#ingress-status-loadbalancer
permalink: xdv72s/
---

With the above file in place, a redirect will be created from https://pulumi.io/xdv72s to https://pulumi.io/reference/troubleshooting#ingress-status-loadbalancer

Note that the trailing / on the permalink is required!

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