Beginners Guide Sphinx-Setup

Contribute to the Neos-Documentation

This Documentation aims to get you started quite from the ground up. A lot of explainations here can of cause be used to work on the whole repository, it just seems to be a good starting point to explain the workflow concerning the documentation first.

Imagine you would like to contribute to the Documentation but you haven’t worked with github yet, you don’t know how a proper workflow looks like and you are not sure how to start contributing. The problem is, that even while explaining some of the basic steps, there always is the need for some kind of basic setup you will have to take care of yourself. You can of cause commit by using GitHub itself. The aim of this document is focusing on working with git locally. You need for eg. a Linux Console and git to get started. [1]

What are the goals?

Once everything is set up nicely and hopefully without to much trouble, you will:

  • know how to commit changes directly on GitHub.

  • be able to easily access the Documentation offline in your browser

  • know how to work with git and hub effectively when editing the Documentation

  • see the life updated changes in your browser

  • send pull request for your changes back to the Neos-Team

  • see how to do some basic formatting with reStructuredText (rST)

  • know how to use the todo functionality

Let’s get started

The easiest way to start is using GitHubs website itself to work on the repository. Just click on the fork-button inside the repository, once you have done this you have got your own copy (fork) of the repo you can work on. At first create a new branch by clicking on the branch-button and typing in a new appropriate branch-name into the input field.

Next you can start editing the files relating to the branch you just created. Now you just need to save your changes by clicking the “Commit changes”-button. (Please read the part below about meaningful commit messages).

Once you have done all the necessary changes you can click the “Create pull request”-button. Again make sure to explain what you have done. This last step opens also a new dialog about your pull request in the original forked repository. Depending of what you have done this will either be merged right away or you might get some feedback if some work might still be necessary.

That’s basically it. Next we will look into the way of making your commits more precise before discussing a detailed offline way of working on the repository.

Guideline - commit messages

Note

The following section was originally posted here (commit message style) by Christian Müller. Please make sure to follow these Guidelines.

To have a clear and focused history of code changes is greatly helped by using a consistent way of writing commit messages. Because of this and to help with (partly) automated generation of change logs for each release we have defined a fixed syntax for commit messages that is to be used.

Warning

Tip: Never commit without a commit message explaining the commit

The syntax is as follows:

Start with one of the following codes:

Note

FEATURE A feature change. Most likely it will be an added feature, but it could also be removed. There should be a corresponding ticket in the issue tracker. Features usually only get into the current development master.

BUGFIX A fix for a bug. There should be a ticket corresponding to this in the issue tracker and we encourage to add a new test that exposes the bug, which makes the work for everyone easier in the future and prevents the bug from reappearing.

TASK Anything not covered by the above categories, e.g. coding style cleanup or documentation changes. Usually only used if there’s no corresponding ticket.

SECURITY A security related change. Those are only commited by active team members in the security community of practice.

MERGE Used for a branch upmerges by the team (or CI server) not something you usually would need to use.

The code is separated by a colon : from a short summary in the same line, no full stop at the end.

If the change affects the public API or is likely to break things on the user side, prefix the line with !!!. This indicates a breaking change that needs human action when updating. Make sure to explain why a change is breaking and in what circumstances. A change including a migration should always be marked breaking to alert users of the need to migrate.

Then (after a blank line) follows the custom message explaining what was done. It should be written in a style that serves well for a change log read by users. If there is more to say about a change add a new paragraph with background information below. In case of breaking changes give a hint on what needs to be changed by the user. If corresponding tickets exist, mention the ticket number(s) using footer lines after another blank line and use the following actions:

<issue number> #close Some additional info if needed If the change resolves a ticket by fixing a bug, implemeting a feature or doing a task. <issue number> #comment Some info why this is related If the change relates to an issue but does not resolve or fix it. This follows Jiras smart commit footers, see more details in the Jira documentation3

A commit messages following the rules…:

Note

TASK: Short (50 chars or less) summary of changes

More detailed explanatory text, if necessary. Wrap it to about 72 characters or so. In some contexts, the first line is treated as the subject of an email and the rest of the text as the body. The blank line separating the summary from the body is critical (unless you omit the body entirely); tools like rebase can get confused if you run the two together.

Write your commit message in the present tense: “Fix bug” and not “Fixed bug.” This convention matches up with commit messages generated by commands like git merge and git revert.

Code snippets:

should be written in
ReStructuredText compatible
format for better highlighting

Further paragraphs come after blank lines.

  • Bullet points are okay, too

  • An asterisk is used for the bullet, it can be preceded by a single space. This format is rendered correctly by Forge (redmine)

  • Use a hanging indent

A first step in solving neos/flow-development-collection#789.

Fixes #123

Closes #456

Examples of good and bad subject lines:

Note

Introduce xyz service BAD, missing code prefix

BUGFIX: Fixed bug xyz BAD, subject should be written in present tense

TASK!!!: A breaking change BAD, subject has to start with !!! for breaking changes

BUGFIX: SessionManager removes expired sessions GOOD, the line explains what the change does, not what the bug is about (this should be explained in the following lines and in the related bug tracker ticket)

!!! BUGFIX: SessionManager never expires sessions GOOD, the line explains what the change does, not what the bug is about (this should be explained in the following lines and in the related bug tracker ticket)

Warning

Please also have a look at this discussion: (Creating a pull request).

Using git in the console

sudo apt-get install git-all hub #(Debian Based)
sudo pacman -Sy git hub #(Arch Linux)
Quote:

“Whether you are beginner or an experienced contributor to open-source, hub makes it easier to fetch repositories, navigate project pages, fork repos and even submit pull requests, all from the command-line.” – hub.github.com

The Atom Editor including the extension packages Git Diff and language-restructuredtext would be nice options for editing the files, etc…:

yaourt atom-editor #(Arch Linux)

(See https://github.com/atom/atom for other Distributions) [2]

Here you can see how the Atom Editor looks like. On the left side you can see, that the new (green) and changed (yellow) folders and files are highlighted, also in the document itself you can see which lines you changed or added:

The Atom Editor

The Atom Editor

To be able to work with GitHub nicely from the console, you could use hub instead of git, for that you can edit and add: alias git=hub to the .bashrc and refresh it:

vim ~/.bashrc #(add: alias git=hub)
source ~/.bashrc #(to reload the .bashrc-file)

The Neos Development Collection Repository

Now lets clone the Neos Development Collection Repository into the folder you are currently in.

git clone https://github.com/neos/neos-development-collection.git

Sphinx requirements

Sphinx is based on Python to make Sphinx available in your System you probably need to install some packages through pip.

sudo pacman -S python-pip

There are different ways of dealing with Python-packages. The following way is to install it in the user-directory and a dding the bin-path to the $PATH – Environment.

pip install --user Sphinx
pip install --user sphinx-autobuild
pip install --user sphinx_rtd_theme

Then add the following line to your .bashrc: export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH

vim ~/.bashrc #(add the above line)
source ~/.bashrc #(to reload the .bashrc-file)

Let the fun begin

Now you should already be able to make the documentation available in the browser. Go into the following folder from where you cloned the Neos-Collection:

cd /neos-development-collection/Neos.Neos/Documentation/

And then run the following command:

make livehtml

If everything works as planed, you should now see a line like this in the console:

[I 160908 18:55:04 server:281] Serving on http://127.0.0.1:8000

Sphinx make livehtml

Sphinx make livehtml

The Url served here is, as long as you keep the process running, live reloaded when the files are changed. Just open the Url in your Browser, you should see the whole Documentation served by your local machine. Now try to open a file in the Neos-Collection eg. the file you are reading right now is located here: /neos-development-collection/Neos.Neos/Documentation/Contribute/Documentation/BeginnersGuide.rst

Sphinx browser view

Sphinx browser view

Now change a line, save it and have a look in the console and the browser. Afterwards undo the change, to make sure git doesn’t take the change seriously yet… The console should have recognised by now, that you are connected with a browser to the url, and now should also tell you which file was changed. If you check the browser again, it should, without manually refreshing the page, show you the edited line in its new version.

reStructuredText (rST)

Now you can start improving the documentation. If you haven’t worked with reStructuredText (rST) it’s pretty simple and gives you quite some options. Just have a look at the Documentation files available, they give you a good understanding of what is possible. It has a lot of capabilities. Checkout their documentation for more informations Sphinx docs.

One nice feature is the, in the Neos-Sphinx setup integrated, extension todo. With todo you are able to point out that there is still some work necessary. Add a todo, if you feel like there is something missing here, or someone else needs to check if what you have written is correct like this. Just use it a lot to make sure it’s obvious what still needs to be done…

Note

Every following line which is indented by two spaces now, is part of the note. If you would replace it with todo instead of (.. note:: -> .. todo::), it wouldn’t be visible in the frontend/browser anymore, but just just visible for you and others, when editing these files.

There is also the possibility to see all the todos with its positions by putting .. todolist:: into the document. Both features (the todo itself and their collection) can be made visible in the browser while working on the documentation for eg. by starting Sphinx like this:

make livehtml SPHINXOPTS="-D todo_include_todos=1"
Sphinx todolist

Sphinx todolist

If you just want to put a simple comment (also not shown in the frontend) you can do the following:

Note

Comments are also invisible in the browser, you can create them by just using two dots (..) at the beginning of a line. The following indented lines are part of the comment.

Warning

Make sure that when you add code-blocks eg. .. code-block:: bash to leave a new line afterwards, otherwise its not being rendered.

GitHub checkout-process

Now we should have a look at the git-workflow. The first step you should checkout a branch from master to be able to work on that locally for now. Somewhere below the Folder neos-development-collection/, you should run the following command to create and enter a new branch:

git checkout -b [local_branch_name]

Now you can start editing the files as you like in your own local feature-branch.

If you’ve been working on a branch here and there, you should probably make sure first, that your master-branch is up to date. The there are two strategies for that. Here we will rebase your only local branch onto master. The following would be an example where you stash your changes for now, so you don’t have to commit them there and then, switch to your local master, pull the changes to be up to date and then apply your changes back to your reactivated feature-branch.

git stash
git checkout master
git pull
git checkout [local_branch_name]
git rebase master
git stash apply

Warning

Make sure not to rebase branches that you’ve collaborated with others on. Never rebase anything you have pushed somewhere already.

To get more information about how to work with git go to this page there are many good sources online. Two good examples are for eg.: SSH, Basic Branching and Merging or also Rebasing.

git add [new files]
git commit -m "FEATURE done with the feature: [local_branch_name] to make this and that more efficient"
git fork #(forking repo on GitHub...)
#→ git remote add YOUR_USER git://github.com/YOUR_USER/neos-development-collection.git
# push the changes to your new remote
git push YOUR_USER feature
# open a pull request for the topic branch you've just pushed
git pull-request
#→ (opens a text editor for your pull request message)

Footnotes