Note Looking to contribute? Check out the Contributer Guide.
To be able to build the docs locally, you need to install the following:
npm
- Hugo
- macOS/Linux:
brew install hugo
- Windows: https://gohugo.io/getting-started/installing/
- macOS/Linux:
You can build the docs for local development using the following command:
make serve-dev
If you would like to see the production view (without drafts and with minified CSS), run:
make serve-prod
You can also run hugo serve
after installing Hugo to show the production view.
To generate the full HTML version of the docs run:
make build-prod
You can serve the resulting docs with:
python3 -m http.server 9000 --directory public
To ensure your markdown is properly formatted, run make markdowntest
.
To check for broken links run make htmltest
.
The docs are automatically published when a PR merges.
We write our docs in Markdown.
If you haven't used Markdown before, have a look at this cheat sheet or look at some of the other docs in the docs
folder for examples.
Each file that generates a page in Hugo starts with front matter that looks like this:
---
title: "Build a line-following robot with only a rover and a webcam"
linkTitle: "Line Follower"
weight: 90
type: "docs"
description: "Instructions for building a line-following robot that uses a webcam to track lines."
# SME: "SME Name"
---
- The
description
gets used for previews. - The
weight
determines the ordering of pages in the side navigation bar.
Add draft: true
to the Front Matter to set a page to Draft.
You can commit and push the page and it won’t display in production.
Add future: true
to the Front Matter to begin building a page to production on a certain date (for example, a release date).
When linking to an image or another page in markdown, it's best to use a relative link.
For example, if you were writing in viam/high-level-overview.md
, Hugo sees this as a directory on the site of docs.viam.com/viam/
.
- To link to another markdown file in the same directory as the markdown file, use
[mylink](../installation/)
. Note the trailing slash as another markdown file is another web directory in Hugo - To link to some image in the same directory as the markdown file, use
[mylink](../img/image1.png)
. - To link something in a different directory, use
[mylink](/components/)
We are also using htmltest
to ensure links within the docs work.
To test locally, install htmltest
.
We have a number of special shortcodes that use HTML templates.
This is how you use them:
Tabs:
{{< tabs name="Example tabs">}}
{{% tab name="Tab 1"%}}
This will be inside Tab 1.
{{% /tab %}}
{{% tab name="Tab 2"%}}
This will be inside Tab 2.
{{% /tab %}}
{{< /tabs >}}
Alerts:
{{< alert title="Tip" color="tip" >}}
A helpful tip
{{< /alert >}}
Expanders:
{{%expand "Click this to see what's inside" %}}
This will be visible if the reader clicks on the expander
{{% /expand%}}
To add a footnote:
"Some completely[^f] random text."
[^f]: this is the text for the footnote
You can place the footnote text immediately beneath the paragraph where you put the marker. Hugo will place it at the bottom of the page.