librenms-librenms/doc/Developing/Creating-Documentation.md

source: Developing/Creating-Documentation.md path: blob/master/doc/

Creating Documentation

One of the goals of the LibreNMS project is to enable users to get all of the help they need from our documentation.

The documentation is generated with mkdocs. If you want to build a local copy, install mkdocs and mkdocs-material, then run make docs. This produces the HTML in docs/out directory.

Alternatively you can start a webserver at http://localhost:8000 for live preview by executing mkdocs serve

Writing docs

When you are adding a new feature or extension, we need to have full documentation to go along with it. It's quite simple to do this:

• Find the relevant directory to store your new document in, General, Support and Extensions are the most likely choices.
• Think of a descriptive name that's not too long, it should match what they may be looking for or describes the feature.
• Add the new document into the nav section of mkdocs.yml if it needs to appear in the table of contents
• Ensure the first line contains: source: path/to/file.md - don't include the initial doc/.
• In the body of the document, be descriptive but keep things simple. Some tips:
  • If the document could cover different distros like CentOS and Ubuntu please try and include the information for them all. If that's not possible then at least put a placeholder in asking for contributions.
  • Ensure you use the correct formating for commands and code blocks by wrapping one liners in backticks or blocks in ```.
  • Put content into sub-headings where possible to organise the content.
• If you rename a file, please add a redirect in for the old file by using <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=/NewLocation/" /> within the old file name.

Please ensure you add the document to the relevant section within pages of mkdocs.yml so that it's in the correct menu and is built. Forgetting this step will result in your document never seeing the light of day :)

Formatting docs

Our docs are based on Markdown using mkdocs which adheres to markdown specs and nothing more, because of that we also import a couple of extra libraries:

• pymdownx.tasklist
• pymdownx.tilde

This means you can use:

• ~~strikethrough~~ to perform strikethrough
• - [X] List items
• Url's can be made [like this](http://www.librenms.org) like this
• Code can be placed in `` for single line or ``` for multiline.
• # Can be used for main headings which translates to a <h1> tag, increasing the #'s will increase the hX tags.
• ### Can be used for sub-headings which will appear in the TOC to the left.

Markdown CheatSheet Link