Contributing with docs¶
Overview¶
The purpose of this quickstart is to help you to make docs-only contributing effortless, without requiring a full development setup.
Workflow¶
1. Setup¶
Pulp uses a dedicated tool to aggregate documentation from its various repositories called pulp-docs.
Once its installed, it'll look for local Pulp repo checkouts in the parent directory and, if not found, it'll clone the last released repo from GitHub into a managed environment.
pipx install pulp-docs
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install pulp-docs
A more comprehensive guide on pulp-docs is documented here.
2. Makes a change¶
Make your changes using markdown and supported mkdocs-material features.
Our docs comply with the Diataxis framework for organizing content. Here is a brief summary:
| Tutorial | How-to Guide | Reference | Explanation | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| purpose | to provide a learning experience | to help achieve a particular goal | to describe the machinery | to illuminate a topic |
| form | a lesson | a series of steps | dry description | discursive explanation |
Also, keep in mind that you are always writting primarily for one of the three types of persona:
- User: "I just want to create sync and publish repositorioes"
- Admin: "I need to get this instance configured and keep it running"
- Developer: "I need to add features, troubleshoot and fix bugs"
When you are done with your changes, you can preview it locally with:
pulp-docs serve
A more comprehensive guide on documentation writting can be found here.
3. Update the changelog entry¶
Pulp uses towncrier to manage its changelog.
It requires that you have a related GitHub issue number, except for trivial changes (such as typo fixes). In those cases the entry is no required at all.
The changelog message should use past simple tense and describe the change being made (as opposed to the problem or user story). Creating an entry can look something like this:
# create entry file
touch CHANGES/3245.doc
# write a message using past simple tense
echo "Added documentation for new pulpcore-manager command" > CHANGES/3245.doc
# create entry file
touch CHANGES/plugin_api/3245.doc
# write a message using past simple tense
echo "Added documentation for new pulpcore-manager command" > CHANGES/3245.doc
A more comprehensive guide on using towncrier in the Pulp project is documented here.
4. Commit and Submit a PR¶
Commit messages in Pulp should contain a human readable explanation of what was fixed. Here are general guidelines:
| extension | description |
|---|---|
| Title | - Should be wrapped at about 50 chars |
| Body | - Should be wrapped at wrapped at 72 characters |
| - May be broken up into paragraphs. | |
| Footer | - Should Linked issue on the plugin Github Issue tracker. See the Github Linking Docs. |
| - May have a [noissue] instead, if really required. |
For more on what constitutes a good commit message, we recommend Tim Pope’s blog post on the subject. Putting this all together, the following is an example of a good commit message:
Update install and quickstart documentation
The install docs and quickstart was leaving out an important step on
the worker configuration.
closes #1392
A more comprehensive guide on using git in the Pulp project is documented here.