Contributing Guide

How to contribute to our website

We use Hugo to format and generate our website, the Docsy theme for styling and site structure, and Netlify to manage the deployment of the site. Hugo is an open-source static site generator that provides us with templates, content organisation in a standard directory structure, and a website generation engine. You write the pages in Markdown (or HTML if you want), and Hugo wraps them up into a website.

All submissions, including submissions by project members, require review. We use GitHub pull requests for this purpose. Consult GitHub Help for more information on using pull requests.

Prerequisites

  • Go 1.15+
  • Mage (optional). You can install it by running go run mage.go EnsureMage from this repository and follow any instructions in the command output.

We use Mage (instead of make) to automate local development tasks. If you do not have mage installed, you can run tasks using Go directly: go run mage TARGET. With Mage installed, you can run mage TARGET.

Run mage -l to see the available targets:

$ mage -l
This is a magefile, and is a "makefile for go". See https://magefile.org/

Targets:
  build         Compile the website to website/public.
  ensureMage    Ensure Mage is installed and on the PATH.
  hugo          Use hugo in a docker container.
  preview*      Run a local server to preview the website and watch for changes.

Content Organization

The main website and the “Maintainers” section is in the SIG Contributor Strategy repository.

  1. Clone the SIG Contributor Strategy repository.

  2. Follow the steps to Preview your changes locally.

  3. Optionally clone the cncf/contribute repository in a directory next to the SIG Contributor Strategy repository to edit content in the “Contributors” section.

    For example, if you have cloned the Contributor Strategy repo to ~/src/sig-contributor-strategy, clone the CNCF Contribute repo to ~/src/contribute.

If you need to clone the CNCF Contribute repository elsewhere, set an environment variable named CONTRIBUTE_REPO to the path where it is cloned. For example, export CONTRIBUTE_REPO=../cncf-contribute.

Quick start with Netlify

Here’s a quick guide to updating the docs. It assumes you’re familiar with the GitHub workflow, and you’re happy to use the automated preview of your doc updates:

  1. Fork the SIG Contributor Strategy repository on GitHub.

  2. Make your changes and send a pull request (PR).

  3. If you’re not yet ready for a review, add “WIP” to the PR name or create a Draft Pull Request to indicate it’s a work in progress.

    If you are creating content that isn’t ready to be published to the site, set draft: true in the page’s frontmatter. This allows you to start a page and collaborate on it with others after your pull request is merged, without having it go live on the real website. Drafts are not visible on the Netlify preview.

  4. Wait for the automated PR workflow to do some checks. When it’s ready, you should see a comment like this: deploy/netlify — Deploy preview ready!

  5. Click Details to the right of “Deploy preview ready” to see a preview of your updates.

  6. Continue updating your doc and pushing your changes until you’re happy with the content.

  7. When you’re ready for a review, add a comment to the PR, and remove any “WIP” markers.

Update a single page

If you’ve just spotted something you’d like to change while using the docs, Docsy has a shortcut for you:

  1. Click Edit this page in the top right hand corner of the page.

  2. If you don’t already have an up to date fork of the project repo, you are prompted to get one - click Fork this repository and propose changes or Update your Fork to get an up to date version of the project to edit. The appropriate page in your fork is displayed in edit mode.

  3. Follow the rest of the Quick start with Netlify process above to make, preview, and propose your changes.

Preview your changes locally

If you want to run a Docker container to preview your changes as you work:

  1. Install Docker and Go.
  2. Fork the SIG Contributor Strategy repository into your own project, then create a local copy using git clone.
  3. Run mage preview to preview the site. When the site is ready, it will open your web browser to http://localhost:1313/. Now that you’re serving your site locally, Hugo will watch for changes to the content and automatically refresh your site.
  4. Continue with the usual GitHub workflow to edit files, commit them, push the changes up to your fork, and create a pull request.

If you need to see the Hugo output, run mage logs.

Creating an issue

If you’ve found a problem in the docs, but you’re not sure how to fix it yourself, please create an issue in the SIG Contributor Strategy repository. You can also create an issue about a specific page by clicking the Create Issue button in the top right hand corner of the page.

Useful resources

Last modified November 6, 2020: Create website for maintainers and contributors (c5bba84)