CiviCRM documentation infrastructure

This repository holds source code for the infrastructure CiviCRM uses to host and update various documentation books built with MkDocs and published to docs.civicrm.org.

You may also wish to:

• Read these documentation books (and other sources of documentation)
• Contribute to documentation content

Documentation books

CiviCRM documentation is organised into various books. The content for a book is written in markdown and stored in a git repository (for example https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-user-guide ). If a book is translated into different languages, then a separate repository is used for each language. If required, different versions of a book can be made by creating different branches in a repository. See Defining books below for more information.

Defining a new book

Books are defined with a Yaml configuration file. To define a new book, create a .yml file and add it to the app/config/books/ directory of this repository.

The config file defines the name of the book, the repository that contains the source code, and the languages that the book is available in, with a repository for each language. For each language, the configuration file defines:

• which edition of the book should be considered stable
• where to find the latest edits to the book
• a history of book editions of the book (these will be publicly listed at https://docs.civicrm.org/).

If you would like to be notified by email whenever an update to a book is published, you can add your email to the notify list.

Example book definition:

name: User guide
description: Aimed at day to day users of CiviCRM.
langs:
    en:
        repo: 'https://github.com/michaelmcandrew/civicrm-user-guide'
        latest: master
        stable: 4.7
        history:
            - 4.6
            - 4.5
            - 4.4
        notify:
            [email protected] # will be notified when documentation is published (as well as any emails mentioned in commits)
    ca:
        repo: 'https://github.com/babu-cat/civicrm-user-guide-ca'
        latest: master
        # stable: master (will not be published)

Publishing updates to a book

Books are automatically published when the corresponding branch is updated their repository. This is typically achieved by making edits and submitting a pull request. Any emails listed in the commits that are submitted as part of the pull request will receive an email with a summary of the update process.

Setting up automatic publishing

Auto updates are configured via webhooks within the repository on GitHub. You will need to be an owner (not just a collaborator) of the repository in order to perform these steps.

1. Go to https://github.com/civicrm/[repo-name]/settings/hooks/new
2. Set the Payload URL to https://docs.civicrm.org/admin/listen
3. Set the Content type to 'application/json'
4. Set Which events would you like to trigger this webhook? to 'Let me select individual events' and select 'Pull request' and 'Push' (since these are the only events that should trigger an update)

Manual publishing

If required, a book can be manually updated by calling a URL in the following format.

https://docs.civicrm.org/admin/publish/{book}/{lang}/{branch}

• {book} the name of the book - as per configuration file in the conf/books directory.
• {lang} the language that you want to publish - as defined in the configuration file.
• {branch} the name of the branch that you want to publish - needs to be a branch in the repository for that language.

Installing a local copy of the docs infrastructure

Docker

The repo includes a dockerfile which you can use to create a container which has everything needed to run the application.

To build the container and install composer dependencies just run (from the project directory):

docker build -t docs-publisher .
docker run --rm -v $PWD:/var/www docs-publisher composer install --working-dir=/var/www

And then to run it:

docker run --rm -v $PWD:/var/www -p 8080:8080 docs-publisher

You might want to change the first 8080 in the port argument if you've already got something listening on that port.

The nginx user in the container will need to be able to write to these directories.

sudo chmod -R a+rw var/cache var/logs/ web/dev/ var/repos/

You should be able to see the app at http://localhost:8080.

On your host machine

Note: the following steps are only useful and necessary for people looking after CiviCRM's documentation infrastructure. You don't need to do this if you just want to contribute to documentation content.

1. Ensure that that you have pip (for python) and composer (for php) installed..

2. Install MkDocs. Ensure that MkDocs is installed as root so that it can be accessed from the src/publish.php script (typically invoked as https://docs.civicrm.org/publish.php)*

3. clone this repository to somewhere like /var/www/civicrm-docs and run composer install

$ git clone /var/www/civicrm-docs
$ cd /var/www/civicrm-docs
$ composer install

4. Set appropriate permissions on web/static

5. Configure an nginx virtual host

$ cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
$ ln -s /var/www/civicrm-docs/app/config/nginx.conf civicrm-docs

6. Reload your nginx config and you should be up and running.

Debugging

You will need xdebug installed and configured to debug from your IDE. In this case we assume you're using PHPStorm.

The docker image comes with xdebug pre-installed and configured. From there the steps you need to take to get it working are:

• From "Settings > Languages and Frameworks > PHP > Debug" change the xdebug port to 9000
• From "Settings > Languages and Frameworks > PHP > Servers" add a new server with any name, host of "localhost", port of 8080.
• In the same screen enable path mappings and map the project directory to "/var/www" under "Absolute path on the server"
• Install the xdebug helper for chrome or firefox, setting the IDE key to "PHPSTORM" if necessary.
• Enable the xdebug helper, put a breakpoint somewhere in web/app_dev.php and visit http://localhost:8080 and the debugged should open PHPStorm