Archived

This project is legacy and should not be used for new documentation. Existing documentation projects using it should be migrated to the Discourse model, or use another solution. If you manage such a project, please reach out to us to facilitate the upgrade.

Ubuntu documentation builder

Maintenance mode

documentation-builder is now considered a legacy product, as all user maintained documentation sets should now be moving to the discourse-docs model.

Important fixes will still be performed, but we will not be adding new features.

A tool for building a set of documentation files in HTML format, from a remote git repository containing markdown files.

Installation

The best way to install documentation-builder is with snap:

sudo snap install documentation-builder

If you don't have snap on your system, you can also install it with pip3:

pip3 install ubuntudesign.documentation-builder

For more information see the documentation.

Development

documentation-builder is a Python module. The main application code lives in ubuntudesign/documentation_builder. Updates to the markup or styling should be made in the default template.

Checking changes

To check your changes to documentation-builder, it's probably easiest to install the module locally, in editable mode, within an encapsulated environment:

python3 -m venv env3 && source env3/bin/activate  # Create encapsulated environment
pip install -e .  # Install the module in editable mode

documentation-builder --source-folder docs  # build the documentation-builder's own documentation
xdg-open build/en/index.html  # Open up the documentation page

Watching for changes

On Ubuntu et al. you can use inotifywait to watch for changes to the source files, and rebuild when something changes as follows:

sudo apt install inotify-tools  # Ensure inotifywait is installed

# Force rebuild docs when anything changes in the source folder
while inotifywait -r -e close_write "./ubuntudesign"; do bin/documentation-builder --force --source-folder docs; done

Tests

To run tests:

./setup.py test

Debugging

To run a specific test:

./setup.py test --addopts tests/test_operations.py::test_find_files

You can debug tests by adding a debugger to the code and running the test again.