This GitHub repository is the source for the Chef documentation published on docs.chef.io.
The chef/chef-web-docs repository contains:
See the Chef Documentation Style Guide for style guidance. If you don't find style guidance in the Chef Documentation Style Guide, use Google's Style Guide or Microsoft's Style Guide.
The Chef documentation source is highly distributed and depends on Hugo modules to pull in documentation from other Chef repositories. The content from those repositories is vendored in chef-web-docs.
To make changes to the content in those repositories, submit pull requests to the appropriate repository. don't submit pull requests to the vendored files in chef-web-docs. We will update those changes after they're merged or after a new version of a product is released.
We source documentation from the following repositories:
We source the theme from this site from https://github.com/chef/chef-docs-theme.
The fastest way to change the documentation is to edit a page on the GitHub website using the GitHub UI.
To perform edits using the GitHub UI, click on the [edit on GitHub]
link at
the top of the page that you want to edit. The link takes you to that topic's GitHub
page. In GitHub, click on the pencil icon and make your changes. You can preview
how they'll look right on the page ("Preview Changes" tab).
We also require contributors to include their DCO signoff
in the comment section of every pull request, except for obvious fixes. You can
add your DCO signoff to the comments by including Signed-off-by:
, followed by
your name and email address, like this:
Signed-off-by: Haris Shefu <hshefu@example.com>
See our blog post for more information about the DCO and why we require it.
After you've added your DCO signoff, add a comment about your proposed change, then click on the "Propose file change" button at the bottom of the page and confirm your pull request. The CI system will do some checks and add a comment to your PR with the results.
The Chef Documentation Team can normally merge pull requests within seven days. We'll fix build errors before we merge, so you don't have to worry about passing all of the CI checks, but it might add an extra few days. The important part is submitting your change.
We use a partial edit_on_github.html
to add "Edit on GitHub" links to each page.
Each page should have a gh_repo
parameter set to the value of the GitHub repository
that the page comes from. For example, gh_repo = "chef-server"
Each repository with documentation has a config.toml
file with a params.<REPOSITORY>
map and a gh_path
parameter set to the path of the docs content directory in
that repository.
The edit_on_github
partial appends the page file name to the end of gh_path
parameter and adds the link to the text of the page.
The Chef Documentation website is built using:
To install Hugo, NPM, and Go on Windows, run:
choco install hugo-extended nodejs golang sass
To install Hugo, NPM, Go, and Dart Sass on macOS, run:
brew install hugo node go sass/sass/sass
To install Hugo on Ubuntu, run:
apt install -y build-essential
snap install node --classic --channel=12
snap install hugo --channel=extended
snap install dart-sass
To clean your local development environment:
Run make clean_all
to delete the SASS files, Javascript, and fonts.
Hugo rebuilds these the next time you run make serve
.
Run make clean_all
to delete the node modules used to build this site
in addition to the functions of make clean
described above. Those node
modules will be reinstalled the next time you run make serve
.
The theme for this site is deployed from the chef/chef-docs-theme repository.
The Node modules defined in the package.json
file are sourced from the package.hugo.json
file in the chef/chef-docs-theme
repository.
To update these Node dependencies, update them in chef/chef-docs-theme
, then update the theme and the package.json
file in this repository.
You can test local changes made to the chef-docs-theme repository and preview those changes using Hugo's local development server. To do this, create a Go workspace file that modifies the source of Hugo's modules, source the workspace file, and start the local server.
For example:
Create a hugo.work
file in root of this project.
Add the following config information to the hugo.work
file:
go 1.22
use .
use ../path/to/local/chef-docs-theme
Start the Hugo local server:
make test_theme
This command adds the hugo.work
file to the Hugo workspace and then ignores the contents of chef-docs-theme
repo in the _vendor
directory.
You can target a Git commit, branch, or tag when importing a module. This allows you to push a test branch up to chef/chef-docs-theme
and then import it into this repository for local testing.
For example:
hugo mod get -u github.com/chef/chef-docs-theme@<GIT_COMMIT_SHA>
or
hugo mod get -u github.com/chef/chef-docs-theme@<GIT_BRANCH>
Run make update_theme
to update the chef-docs-theme to the latest commit. This updates the theme and the theme's node dependencies.
You can preview documentation using one of the following:
Netlify generates deploy previews of pull requests made on the chef-web-docs repository and adds a link to the pull request page. This is automatic for members of the Chef GitHub organization; the Documentation Team can manually trigger Netlify to build previews from contributors who aren't members of the Chef GitHub organization.
make serve
You can use the Netlify CLI to build and preview documentation locally.
This is useful for previewing redirects configured in the netlify.toml
file.
Requirements:
Run netlify dev
to preview the site using the Netlify CLI.
make serve_ignore_vendor
Some Chef documentation is stored in private repositories so this option is only available to Progress Chef employees.
Vendoring stores all of the module content
from other repositories in the _vendor
directory at the commit specified by
the go.mod
file. When Hugo builds the documentation, it will grab content from
the _vendor
directory instead of the original repository OR a local copy of a
that repository. To see which commits the vendored files reference, see the
_vendor/modules.txt
file.
To vendor the modules in chef-web-docs, run hugo mod vendor
.
To update the vendored modules, first update the Hugo module(s),
then run hugo mod vendor
.
To ignore the vendored files in a Hugo build, run make serve_ignore_vendor
. This
is the same as make serve
except it adds the --ignoreVendor
flag. This will
build the documentation from the GitHub repositories or from a local copy of a repository
if the go.mod
file specifies pulling content from a local repository. (see above)
Hugo modules are pinned to a particular commit of the master branch in their repository.
If you look in the go.mod
and go.sum
files, you'll notice that each repository
specifies a git commit timestamp and SHA.
To update a particular repo, run:
hugo mod get github.com/chef/repo_to_update/subdirectory
hugo mod clean
Then vendor the documentation:
hugo mod vendor
For example, to update the chef-workstation repository:
hugo mod get github.com/chef/chef-workstation/docs-chef-io
hugo mod clean
hugo mod vendor
This will update that repository to the most recent commit.
You can also update a module to a commit version number. For example:
hugo mod get github.com/chef/chef-workstation/docs-chef-io@20.6.62
hugo mod clean
hugo mod vendor
And you can update a module to a Git commit. For example:
hugo mod get github.com/chef/chef-workstation/docs-chef-io@0ad84dd5fa8
hugo mod clean
hugo mod vendor
The hugo mod clean
command removes references to commits in the
go.mod
and go.sum
files that are no longer relevant.
See Hugo's documentation for additional information about updating Hugo Modules.
The theme for this site is sourced from chef/chef-docs-theme.
Run make update_theme
to update the theme module and Node package dependencies.
Sometimes Hugo and Git are a bit difficult and won't update a module cleanly or will leave
references to older commits of a module in the go.sum
file.
If you get an error indicating that Git can't find a repository that's already added as a module, try restarting your computer.
If you still having trouble, try rebuilding the go.mod
and go.sum
files:
go.mod
and go.sum
files.hugo mod init github.com/chef/chef-web-docs
This will generate a new, blank go.mod
file.hugo mod get -u
.go.mod
and go.sum
files to keep the older commits for the modules that
you don't want to update.hugo mod tidy
. This probably won't do anything on newly initialized go.mod
and go.sum
files, but it can't hurt either.hugo mod vendor
.Release notes are added to release notes pages using Hugo's resource.getRemote
function and content from https://omnitruck.chef and https://packages.chef.io.
Chef Automate release versions, release dates, and links to release note Markdown files come from https://packages.chef.io/releases/current/automate.json.
Release versions for Chef Habitat come from https://api.github.com/repos/habitat-sh/habitat/releases
.
Release versions for Chef InSpec Cloud resources comes from _vendor/github.com/inspec/inspec-<PLATFORM>/docs-chef-io/assets/release-notes/inspec-<PLATFORM>/release-dates.json
.
Release versions for all other Chef products come from https://omnitruck.chef.io/stable/<PRODUCT>/versions/all
.
Each release note page comes from a Markdown file from https://packages.chef.io/release-notes/<PRODUCT>/<VERSION>.md
.
If a release note Markdown file isn't returned from packages.chef.io, the release note for that version will show the text, "This release doesn't have any release notes."
Release note pages are only generated in the production environment. Running make serve
won't build any of the content in the release note pages.
Run make production
to build and preview the release notes.
Run make clean_all
to purge locally cached release note files.
To add a release notes page to chef-web-docs, add the following to a Markdown page:
release_notes = "<CHEF_PRODUCT>"
product = "<CHEF_PRODUCT>"
layout = "release_notes"
toc_layout = "release_notes_toc"
The <CHEF_PRODUCT>
value comes from the Product Key in the Product Matrix.
Any content included in the release notes Markdown file will be included at the top of the page and the release notes will be appended below.
The commit history of this repo before February 12, 2016 has been archived to the chef-web-docs-2016 repo to save space. No changes to the archive repo will be merged; it's just for historical purposes.
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