Write the Docs website

This is the code that powers www.writethedocs.org. It contains information about the Write the Docs group, as well as information about writing documentation.

To contribute to the Write the Docs website, it's helpful to familiarize yourself with the Sphinx site generator and reStructuredText markup syntax.

Code Architecture

All of the generated website lives inside the docs directory, but many files outside the conf/ directory are just static RST like any other Sphinx project.

All RST files are rendered with Jinja, which allows the use of Jinja tags in all of them. A few custom Jinja filters are available for things like generating photo paths for speakers.

Conference pages

For conferences, see the conference site documentation.

Videos

An even more fragile process that needs documenting and fixing. Note specifically if year > 2023: around line 134 of docs/_ext/videos.py.

WIP (Work In Progress) Docs on how to do this:

1. In _data/<year>.<city>.speakers.yaml, add a youtubeId: 12345678901 key value pair to each talk. See also _scripts/insert-video-ids.py.

2. Make sure the directory videos/<city>/<year> is included in the Video Archive toctree in docs/videos/index.rst.

3. In the virtual environment, switch to the docs directory and run BUILD_VIDEOS=True make html.

4. Commit the relevant changed files:

   • docs/videos/index.rst
   • _data/<year>.<city>.speakers.yaml
   • docs/videos/<city>/<year>/*

5. If you want to preview locally:

   1. Run BUILD_VIDEOS=True make livehtml and browse the new video pages at http://127.0.0.1:8888.

Troubleshooting

If you run into trouble with broken links to video files, have a look at _ext/fix_video_yaml.py:

1. Add a line at the end with the relevant places and dates.

2. Change to the _ext directory and run it:

   python fix_video_yaml.py

3. Commit the fixed _data/<year>.<city>.speakers.yaml file.

Prerequisites for generating the docs locally

1. Install python 3.8.x using your package manager, if not installed already. You'll probably need root privileges to do this.

2. Generate a virtual environment for the WTD repo in the venv directory:

   virtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python3.8 venv

Installing the project requirements

1. Activate the virtual environment as per your operating system:

   • On Linux-based systems, run source venv/bin/activate.
   • On Windows using the Command Prompt, run venv\Scripts\activate.bat.
   • On Windows using PowerShell, run . venv\Scripts\activate.ps1.
   • On Windows using Git Bash, run source venv\Scripts\activate.

   You'll need to do this every time you come back to the project.

2. In the repository root directory (www by default), run pip install -r requirements.txt to install sphinx and other requirements.

Previewing the docs locally

Remember to activate the virtual environment using the appropriate command for your OS and Shell before running the following commands.

1. In the docs directory, run make livehtml to view the docs on http://127.0.0.1:8888/.

If you're not seeing new content in the local preview, run make clean to delete the generated files, then make livehtml to regenerate them.

The Write the Docs website is hosted on Read the Docs.

Updating the CSS

Styling is maintained in docs/_static/conf/css/ as SASS. Convert SASS to minified CSS by installing SASS

npm install -g sass

and then running (using a 2022 example):

sass --style=compressed docs/_static/conf/scss/main-2022.scss docs/_static/conf/css/main-2022.min.css

Deactivating venv

After your work is complete, you can save resources by deactivating the virtual Python environment with the following command on Linux:

deactivate

If you have verified this command on Windows, we invite you to submit a PR to include that information here.