lakeFS Documentation

Any contribution to the docs, whether it is in conjunction with a code contribution or as a standalone, is appreciated.

Please see the contributing guide for details on contributing to lakeFS in general.

lakeFS Documentation Philosophy
lakeFS Style Guide:
Headings and Table of Contents
Callouts 💬
Links 🔗
Test your changes locally
Link Checking locally

📝 Notice! lakeFS documentation is written using Markdown. Make sure to familiarize yourself with the Markdown Guide.

Customizing the lakeFS docs site should follow the following guidelines: Just The Docs Customization and style-guide.

lakeFS Documentation Philosophy

We are heavily inspired by the Diátaxis approach to documentation. At a very high-level, it defines documentation as falling into one of four categories:

How To
Tutorial
Reference
Explanation

There is a lot more to it than this, and you are encouraged to read the Diátaxis website for more details. Its application to lakeFS was discussed in #6197

lakeFS Style Guide:

Don’t use unnecessary tech jargon or vague/wordy constructions - keep it friendly, not condescending.
Be inclusive and welcoming - use gender-neutral words and pronouns when talking about abstract people like users and developers.
Replace complex expressions with simpler ones.
Keep it short - 25-30 words max per sentence. Otherwise, your readers might get lost on the way.
Use active voice instead of passive. For example: This feature can be used to do task X. vs. You can use this feature to do task X. The second one reads much better, right?
You can explain things better by including examples. Show, not tell. Use illustrations, images, gifs, code snippets, etc.
Establish a visual hierarchy to help people quickly find the information they need. Use text formatting to create levels of title and subtitle (such as # to ###### markdown headings). The title of every page should use the topmost heading #; all other headings on the page should use lower headers ## to ######.

Headings and Table of Contents

The title of the page should be H1 (# in markdown). Use headings in descending order and do not skip any.

Pages should generally have a table of contents to help the user navigate it. Use the following snippet to add it to your page:

<div class="toc-block">
## Table of contents
{: .no_toc .text-delta }

1. TOC
{:toc}
{::options toc_levels="2" /}
</div>

By default the page’s Table of Contents will include only H2 headings. If you want to include H2 and H3 then use this snippet instead:

<div class="toc-block">
## Table of contents
{: .no_toc .text-delta }

1. TOC
{:toc}
{::options toc_levels="2..3" /}
</div>

Both of these snippets invoke {:toc} which is used by Kramdown (the Markdown processor that Jekyll uses) to insert a table of contents from the headings present in the markdown.

Callouts 💬

Multiple callout types are available. Please review this page for details.

Links 🔗

Links should use absolute paths in conjunction with {% link %}, e.g. {% link foo/example.md %}.

Adding a link with an anchor is a bit trickier. Create a reference [link text][link-reference] and then define the anchor at the end of the document:

[link-reference]:  {% link foo.example.md %}#anchor

This is so that references work within the versioned documentation that is deployed.

Relative links, unless within the local folder, are discouraged as it can cause additional work when moving pages at a later date.

Test your changes locally

If you have the necessary dependencies installed, you can run Jekyll to build and serve the documentation from your machine using the provided Makefile target:

make docs-serve

The alternative is to use Docker which has the benefit of handling all the dependencies for you.

Docker

Launch the Docker container:

docker run --rm \
           --name lakefs_docs \
           -e TZ="Etc/UTC" \
           --publish 4000:4000 --publish 35729:35729 \
           --volume="$PWD/docs:/srv/jekyll:Z" \
           --volume="$PWD/docs/.jekyll-bundle-cache:/usr/local/bundle:Z" \
           --interactive --tty \
           jekyll/jekyll:3.8 \
           jekyll serve --livereload

If you have make installed, you can also run make docs-serve-docker instead.

The first time you run the container it will need to download dependencies and will take several minutes to be ready.

Once you see the following output, the docs server is ready to open in your web browser:
```
Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.
```
When you make a change to a page’s source the server will automatically rebuild the page which will be shown in the server log by this entry:
```
Regenerating: 1 file(s) changed at 2023-01-26 08:34:47
               contributing.md
Remote Theme: Using theme pmarsceill/just-the-docs
```
This can take a short while—you’ll see something like this in the server’s output when it’s done.
```
...done in 34.714073460 seconds.
```
Your page will automatically reload to show the changes.

If you are doing lots of work on the docs you may want to leave the Docker container in place (so that you don’t have to wait for the dependencies to load each time you re-create it). To do this replace the --rm with --detach in the docker run command, and use docker logs -f lakefs_docs to view the server log.

Link Checking locally

When making a pull request to lakeFS that involves a docs/* file, a GitHub action will automagically check the links. You can also run this link checker manually on your local machine:

Build the site:

docker run --rm \
         --name lakefs_docs \
         -e TZ="Etc/UTC" \
         --volume="$PWD/docs:/srv/jekyll:Z" \
         --volume="$PWD/docs/.jekyll-bundle-cache:/usr/local/bundle:Z" \
         --interactive --tty \
         jekyll/jekyll:3.8 \
         jekyll build --config _config.yml -d _site --watch

Check the links:

docker run --rm \
         --name lakefs_docs_lychee \
         --volume "$PWD:/data"\
         --volume "/tmp:/output"\
         --tty \
         lycheeverse/lychee:master \
         --exclude-file /data/docs/.lycheeignore \
         --output /output/lychee_report.md \
         --format markdown \
         /data/docs/_site

Review the lychee_report.md in your local /tmp folder