StackStorm is a platform for integration and automation across services and tools, taking actions in response to events. Learn more at www.stackstorm.com.

Writing the Docs

Product documentation for StackStorm is maintained in this repository. These docs are built using Sphinx.

Contributing

• Fork this repo on GitHub (https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo/).
• Make changes to the docs using your favorite editor.
• To update docs for the latest - i.e. unstable - release of StackStorm, base your changes off the master branch.
• To update docs for a released version of StackStorm pick the appropriate version branch (v1.2 etc) and make changes.
• Push changes to your fork.
• Create a pull request (https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-pull-request/) against StackStorm/st2docs repository to upstream the changes.
• Wait for Travis to complete and one of the StackStorm team shall merge the change.

Build and Run the Docs.

Follows these steps to build the docs locally:

git clone https://github.com/StackStorm/st2docs.git
cd st2docs
make docs

Keep in mind that the initial make docs run will take a while because it needs to install all the Python dependencies which are needed to build the docs.

make livedocs builds the docs and runs the doc site live at http://localhost:8000 to validate changes locally prior to committing any code.

Sphinx Tricks

• If the whole section belongs in the Enterprise Edition, put the following note:

  .. note::
  
     Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is only available in StackStorm Enterprise Edition. For
     information about enterprise edition and differences between community and enterprise edition,
     please see `stackstorm.com/product <https://stackstorm.com/product/#enterprise>`_.
  

  Refer to Enterprise edition in passing with

    `see Enterprise Edition <https://stackstorm.com/product/#enterprise>`_
  

• TODO (Use http://localhost:8000/todo.html for full TODO list (must be empty when we ship) :

  .. todo:: Here is a TODO

• Code fragment:

  .. code-block: bash

  # List all available triggers
    st2 trigger list
  

• Reference the document

  :doc:/start :doc:in the Rules doc </rules>

• Referencing an arbitrary section: for instance, there's examples section in sensors.rst. Define a reference on examples section in sensors.rst:

     .. _sensors-examples:
  

  and point to it as from this, or from other documents as:

       :ref:`sensors-examples`
       :ref:`My examples <sensors-examples>`
  

  Note that the leading _ underscore is gone, and the reference is quoted.

  Name convention for references is _filename-refname (because they are unique across the docs). Note that there is no way to reference just a point in the docs. See http://sphinx-doc.org/markup/inline.html#cross-referencing-syntax

• External links:

  External link <http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=stackstorm>_

• Inlcude a document, full body:

  .. include:: /engage.rst

• Link to GitHub st2 repo

  :github_st2:st2/st2common/st2common/operators.py </st2common/st2common/operators.py>

• Link to Github st2contrib repo:

  :github_contrib:Link to docker README on st2contrib<packs/docker/README.md>

• Link to st2contrib and st2incubator repos on Github (using a global we set up in source/conf.py)

  st2contrib_ st2incubator_

• The pattern to include an example from /st2/contrib/examples: make example file name a reference on github. May say that it is deployed to /usr/share/doc/st2/examples/, and auto-include the file:

  Sample rule: :github_st2:sample-rule-with-webhook.yaml </contrib/examples/rules/sample-rule-with-webhook.yaml> :

  .. literalinclude:: /../../st2/contrib/examples/rules/sample_rule_with_webhook.yaml :language: json

Pandoc - convert md <-> rst and more

pandoc - a super-tool to convert between formats. Sample for markdown conversion:

sudo apt-get install pandoc pandoc --from=markdown --to=rst --output=README.rst README.md

Running docs only

To make docs changes, without installing full development environment (e.g., on Mac or Windows):

git clone [email protected]:StackStorm/st2docs.git
cd st2docs
make docs
# make docs will fail; ignore the failure: 
# it will get st2 and set up virtualenv with sphinx/shinx-autobuild
. virtualenv/bin/activate
sphinx-autobuild -H 0.0.0.0 -b html ./docs/source/ ./docs/build/html

Edit, enjoy live updates.

Misc

It's ironic that I use Markdown to write about rST tricks.