terraform-docs-agents

Content for Terraform's agents documentation.

• https://terraform.io/cloud-docs/agents

Contributions Welcome!

If you find a typo or you feel like you can improve the HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, we welcome contributions. Feel free to open issues or pull requests like any normal GitHub project, and we'll merge it in 🚀

Where the Docs Live

Deployment

The website reads content from release tags to generate documentation for all versions of terraform-docs-agents documentation. Changes merged into main will be included in the documentation for the next product release.

You cannot edit documentation for past versions of terraform-docs-agents on the site. Documentation is an artifact of a product release. We push docs fixes forward for the next release, rather than retroactively fixing older versions.

Previewing Changes

You should preview your changes locally to ensure that the content is rendering properly before you create a pull request. The build includes content from this repository and the terraform-website repository, allowing you to preview the entire Terraform documentation site.

To preview your content, complete the following steps:

Set Up Local Environment

1. Install Docker.
2. Restart your terminal or command line session.

Launch Site Locally

1. Navigate into your local terraform-docs-agents top-level directory and run make website.
2. Open http://localhost:3000 in your web browser. While the preview is running, you can edit pages and Next.js will automatically rebuild them.
3. When you're done with the preview, press ctrl-C in your terminal to stop the server.

Deployment

The website reads content from release tags to generate documentation for all versions of terraform-docs-agents documentation. Changes merged into main are included in the documentation for the next product release.

You cannot edit documentation for past versions of terraform-docs-agents on the site. Documentation is an artifact of a product release. We push docs fixes forward for the next release, rather than retroactively fixing older versions.

Editing Markdown Content

Documentation content is written in Markdown and you'll find all files listed under the /content directory.

To create a new page with Markdown, create a file ending in .mdx in a website/docs/<subdirectory>. The path in the content directory will be the URL route. For example, website/docs/docs/hello.mdx will be served from the /docs/hello URL.

Important: Files and directories will only be rendered and published to the website if they are included in sidebar data. Any file not included in sidebar data will not be rendered or published.

This file can be standard Markdown and also supports YAML frontmatter. YAML frontmatter is optional, there are defaults for all keys.

---
title: "My Title"
description: "A thorough, yet succinct description of the page's contents"
---

The significant keys in the YAML frontmatter are:

• title (string) - This is the title of the page that will be set in the HTML title.
• description (string) - This is a description of the page that will be set in the HTML description.

⚠️ If there is a need for a /api/* url on this website, the url will be changed to /api-docs/*, as the api folder is reserved by next.js.

Validating Content

Content changes are automatically validated against a set of rules as part of the pull request process. If you want to run these checks locally to validate your content before committing your changes, you can run the following command:

npm run content-check

If the validation fails, actionable error messages will be displayed to help you address detected issues.

Creating New Pages

There is currently a small bug with new page creation - if you create a new page and link it up via subnav data while the server is running, it will report an error saying the page was not found. This can be resolved by restarting the server.

Markdown Enhancements

There are several custom markdown plugins that are available by default that enhance standard markdown to fit our use cases. This set of plugins introduces a couple instances of custom syntax, and a couple specific pitfalls that are not present by default with markdown, detailed below:

• If you see the symbols ~>, ->, =>, or !>, these represent custom alerts. These render as colored boxes to draw the user's attention to some type of aside.
• If you see @include '/some/path.mdx', this is a markdown include. It's worth noting as well that all includes resolve from website/content/partials by default, and that changes to partials will not live-reload the website.
• If you see # Headline ((#slug)), this is an example of an anchor link alias. It adds an extra permalink to a headline for compatibility and is removed from the output.

• Due to automatically generated permalinks, any text changes to headlines or list items that begin with inline code can and will break existing permalinks. Be very cautious when changing either of these two text items.

  Headlines are fairly self-explanatory, but here's an example of how to list items that begin with inline code look.

  - this is a normal list item
  - `this` is a list item that begins with inline code

  Its worth noting that only the inline code at the beginning of the list item will cause problems if changed. So if you changed the above markup to...

  - lsdhfhksdjf
  - `this` jsdhfkdsjhkdsfjh

  ...while it perhaps would not be an improved user experience, no links would break because of it. The best approach is to avoid changing headlines and inline code at the start of a list item. If you must change one of these items, make sure to tag someone from the digital marketing development team on your pull request, they will help to ensure as much compatibility as possible.

Custom Components

A number of custom mdx components are available for use within any .mdx file. If you have questions about custom components, or have a request for a new custom component, please reach out to @hashicorp/digital-marketing.

Syntax Highlighting

When using fenced code blocks, the recommendation is to tag the code block with a language so that it can be syntax highlighted. For example:

// BAD: Code block with no language tag

```javascript
// GOOD: Code block with a language tag

Check out the [supported languages list](https://prismjs.com/#supported-languages) for the syntax highlighter we use if you want to double check the language name.

It is also worth noting specifically that if you are using a code block that is an example of a terminal command, the correct language tag is `shell-session`. For example:

🚫**BAD**: Using `shell`, `sh`, `bash`, or `plaintext` to represent a terminal command

$ terraform apply

✅**GOOD**: Using `shell-session` to represent a terminal command

$ terraform apply

<!-- END: editing-markdown -->

<!-- BEGIN: editing-docs-sidebars -->
<!-- Generated text, do not edit directly -->

## Editing Navigation Sidebars

The structure of the sidebars are controlled by files in the [`/data` directory](data). For example, [data/docs-nav-data.json](data/docs-nav-data.json) controls the **docs** sidebar. Within the `data` folder, any file with `-nav-data` after it controls the navigation for the given section.

The sidebar uses a simple recursive data structure to represent _files_ and _directories_. The sidebar is meant to reflect the structure of the docs within the filesystem while also allowing custom ordering. Let's look at an example. First, here's our example folder structure:

```text
.
├── docs
│   └── directory
│       ├── index.mdx
│       ├── file.mdx
│       ├── another-file.mdx
│       └── nested-directory
│           ├── index.mdx
│           └── nested-file.mdx

Here's how this folder structure could be represented as a sidebar navigation, in this example it would be the file website/data/docs-nav-data.json:

[
  {
    "title": "Directory",
    "routes": [
      {
        "title": "Overview",
        "path": "directory"
      },
      {
        "title": "File",
        "path": "directory/file"
      },
      {
        "title": "Another File",
        "path": "directory/another-file"
      },
      {
        "title": "Nested Directory",
        "routes": [
          {
            "title": "Overview",
            "path": "directory/nested-directory"
          },
          {
            "title": "Nested File",
            "path": "directory/nested-directory/nested-file"
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
]

A couple more important notes:

• Within this data structure, ordering is flexible, but hierarchy is not. The structure of the sidebar must correspond to the structure of the content directory. So while you could put file and another-file in any order in the sidebar, or even leave one or both of them out, you could not decide to un-nest the nested-directory object without also un-nesting it in the filesystem.
• The title property on each node in the nav-data tree is the human-readable name in the navigation.
• The path property on each leaf node in the nav-data tree is the URL path where the .mdx document will be rendered, and the
• Note that "index" files must be explicitly added. These will be automatically resolved, so the path value should be, as above, directory rather than directory/index. A common convention is to set the title of an "index" node to be "Overview".

Below we will discuss a couple of more unusual but still helpful patterns.

Index-less Categories

Sometimes you may want to include a category but not have a need for an index page for the category. This can be accomplished, but as with other branch and leaf nodes, a human-readable title needs to be set manually. Here's an example of how an index-less category might look:

.
├── docs
│   └── indexless-category
│       └── file.mdx

// website/data/docs-nav-data.json
[
  {
    "title": "Indexless Category",
    "routes": [
      {
        "title": "File",
        "path": "indexless-category/file"
      }
    ]
  }
]

Custom or External Links

Sometimes you may have a need to include a link that is not directly to a file within the docs hierarchy. This can also be supported using a different pattern. For example:

[
  {
    "name": "Directory",
    "routes": [
      {
        "title": "File",
        "path": "directory/file"
      },
      {
        "title": "Another File",
        "path": "directory/another-file"
      },
      {
        "title": "Tao of HashiCorp",
        "href": "https://www.hashicorp.com/tao-of-hashicorp"
      }
    ]
  }
]

If the link provided in the href property is external, it will display a small icon indicating this. If it's internal, it will appear the same way as any other direct file link.

Content Images

Image files should be placed in the website/img directory.

In markdown, images should be referenced by their absolute path, starting with /img. This will look like:

![Alt text goes here](/img/docs/my-image.png)

Note: Images aren't expected to work GitHub markdown in previews, but they will work during local preview and Vercel deploy previews

Redirects

You must add a redirect when you move, rename, or delete documentation pages. Refer to https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-website#redirects for details.