Documenting¶
Documentation is awesome. You should write it. Here’s how.
All the CommCareHQ docs are stored in a docs/
folder in the root of the repo.
To add a new doc, make an appropriately-named rst file in the docs/
directory.
For the doc to appear in the table of contents, add it to the toctree
list in index.rst
.
Sooner or later we’ll probably want to organize the docs into sub-directories, that’s fine, you can link to specific locations like so: `Installation <intro/install>`
.
For a more complete working set of documentation, check out Django’s docs directory. This is used to build docs.djangoproject.com.
Index¶
Sphinx is used to build the documentation.
Writing Documentation - Some general tips for writing documentation
reStructuredText is used for markup.
Editors with RestructuredText support
Sphinx¶
Sphinx builds the documentation and extends the functionality of rst a bit for stuff like pointing to other files and modules.
To build a local copy of the docs (useful for testing changes), navigate to the docs/
directory and run make html
.
Open <path_to_commcare-hq>/docs/_build/html/index.html
in your browser and you should have access to the docs for your current version (I bookmarked it on my machine).
Writing Documentation¶
For some great references, check out Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s series Writing Great Documentation and this blog post by Steve Losh. Here are some takeaways:
Use short sentences and paragraphs
Break your documentation into sections to avoid text walls
Avoid making assumptions about your reader’s background knowledge
Consider three types of documentation:
Tutorials - quick introduction to the basics
Topical Guides - comprehensive overview of the project; everything but the dirty details
Reference Material - complete reference for the API
One aspect that Kaplan-Moss doesn’t mention explicitly (other than advising us to “Omit fluff” in his Technical style piece) but is clear from both his documentation series and the Django documentation, is what not to write. It’s an important aspect of the readability of any written work, but has other implications when it comes to technical writing.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry wrote, “… perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.”
Keep things short and take stuff out where possible. It can help to get your point across, but, maybe more importantly with documentation, means there is less that needs to change when the codebase changes.
Think of it as an extension of the DRY principle.
reStructuredText¶
reStructuredText is a markup language that is commonly used for Python documentation. You can view the source of this document or any other to get an idea of how to do stuff (this document has hidden comments). Here are some useful links for more detail:
Editors¶
While you can use any text editor for editing RestructuredText documents, I find two particularly useful:
PyCharm (or other JetBrains IDE, like IntelliJ), which has great syntax highlighting and linting.
Sublime Text, which has a useful plugin for hard-wrapping lines called Sublime Wrap Plus. Hard-wrapped lines make documentation easy to read in a console, or editor that doesn’t soft-wrap lines (i.e. most code editors).
Vim has a command
gq
to reflow a block of text (:help gq
). It uses the value oftextwidth
to wrap (:setl tw=75
). Also check out:help autoformat
. Syntastic has a rst linter. To make a line a header, justyypVr=
(or whatever symbol you want).
Examples¶
Some basic examples adapted from 2 Scoops of Django:
Section Header¶
Sections are explained well here
emphasis (bold/strong)
italics
Simple link: http://commcarehq.org
Inline link: CommCareHQ
Fancier Link: CommCareHQ
An enumerated list item
Second item
First bullet
- Second bullet
Indented Bullet
Note carriage return and indents
Literal code block:
def like():
print("I like Ice Cream")
for i in range(10):
like()
Python colored code block (requires pygments):
# You need to "pip install pygments" to make this work.
for i in range(10):
like()
JavaScript colored code block:
console.log("Don't use alert()");