Documentation

What follows is a style guide for the DKAN documentation. Use it both to follow the conventions used throughout the site, and for your own contributions. DKAN’s documentation is written in a combination of Markdown and ReStructuredText (RST), and built with Sphinx. The docs live in the /docs/source folder of the DKAN Project; to suggest modifications, submit a pull request as you would for any suggested code change.

File types

Index files should always be in RST, to render correctly in the sidebar when built. Additional files can be in markdown or RST format depending on your preference.

In some cases, README.md files are pulled into the docs site from elsewhere in the repository. This is accomplished with an include directive.

.. include:: ../../../path/to/README.md
  :parser: myst_parser.sphinx_

Images

Screenshots should be taken at standard desktop resolution (no retina!) and avoid showing any browser chrome. If necessary they may contain arrows and annotations in red with sans-serif typeface. DKAN team to post files to S3. External teams can submit images attached to the PR.

Text conventions

Modules

Module names are written in Title Case with no additional styling. Quotes can be used if needed for clarity – for instance, it might be confusing to talk about how the “Data” module affects data on the site without quote marks. When possible, a module name is linked to its home page (on Drupal.org or Github) on its first mention in a page.

Files

Filenames are written as inline code as in this example: thisfile.txt will do the trick.

Terminal commands

Terminal commands should be expressed in a sphinx prompt block:

.. prompt:: bash $

  drush cim -y
  drush cr

Which will render like this:

drush cim -y
drush cr

Code blocks

Code blocks are expressed as… code blocks:

..code-block:: php

  /**
   * Your php code here
   */

to produce something like this:

/**
* Adds declared endpoint to list.
*
* This and hook_open_data_schema_map_load() are necessary so that modules can
* declare more than one endpoint.
*/
function hook_open_data_schema_map_endpoints_alter(&$records) {
  $records[] = 'my_machine_name';
}

Code objects

When referring to `$variables`, `function_names()` and `classNames` inline, use bold inline code style. This can be achieved in markdown like this:

**`This text`** will be code-styled and bold

Building these docs

If you contribute significantly to this documentation, at some point you will want build them locally to preview your formatting and other markup. This will require some degree of comfort with command-line tools but is otherwise fairly straightforward.

Sphinx

Sphinx is the Python tool that generates the HTML from the documentation RST files.

See also

Refer to the Sphinx installation instructions for more information if the instructions here are not sufficient.

To build Sphinx documentation, you will need to have a Python 3 runtime installed locally. You can also install Sphinx and the other dependencies (listed in docs/requirements.txt) at the local system level, but we recommend using a Python virtual environment:

cd docs
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

You will now see a (.venv) prefix in your terminal, indicating that the virtual environment is active. You can deactivate it at any time by running the deactivate command.

Now that your virtual environment is active, install the dependencies. Make sure you are in the /docs directory:

pip install -r requirements.txt

If you need to activate your virtual environment again in the future, just run the source .venv/bin/activate command again from the /docs directory. The dependencies only need to be installed once, but the virtual environment is only active for the current terminal session.

Now you should be able to build the Sphinx site by typing

make html

Tip

Depending on your local environment, the tools installed by pip may not be available in the make process’ $PATH. If the make command produces an error like

/bin/sh: line 1: sphinx-build: command not found

you can pass it the full sphinx-build command explicitly like this:

SPHINXBUILD=$(which sphinx-build) make html

The documentation will build in docs/build/html, you can then open the docs/build/html/index.html file in a browser to preview your changes.

Sometimes changes to indexes are not picked up very well. If you see issues with the sidebar table of contents, delete the docs/build directory by running:

make clean

Autobuilding

You can have the documentation automatically rebuild when you make changes to the source files using the sphinx-autobuild command instead of make:

sphinx-autobuild ./source ./build/html

The process will stay attached to your terminal. You should see a link to a local server where you can now see the live documentation, usually at http://127.0.0.1:8000. Whenever you make changes to the source files, the documentation will automatically rebuild and refresh in the browser.