Working on the Docs¶

This page is about working with the DDEV documentation. See the Writing Style Guide for stylistic guidance.

Fix Docs Using Web Browser¶

The documentation is built and checked automatically with various GitHub Actions workflows. While it may help to check your work locally for more involved PRs, you can more quickly make suggestions using GitHub in a browser:

Click the pencil in the upper right. That will take you to the right page on GitHub.
Click the pencil button on GitHub and follow the instructions to create your change.
Save your changes and follow the prompts to create a PR.
In the checks on your PR, click the “details” link by docs/readthedocs.org:ddev to browse the docs build created by your PR.
Once the PR has run its checks, you’ll see an item labeled docs/readthedocs.org:ddev. Click “Details” to review a docs build that includes your changes:
Take a look at the “Check docs” action to make sure there were no linting or spelling errors.

Fork or Clone the DDEV Repository¶

To start making changes you’ll need a local copy of the DDEV documentation, so fork the DDEV repository which includes the documentation.

After forking the repository, you can clone it to your local machine.

Make Changes¶

Now that you’ve got a local copy, you can make your changes.

Action	Path
Documentation	`./docs/content/users/` `./docs/content/developers/`
MkDocs configuration	`./mkdocs.yml`
Front end	`./docs/content/assets/extra.css` `./docs/content/assets/extra.js`

Development Tools Installation¶

For documentation development and testing, install the required tools once using:

scripts/install-dev-tools.sh

This installs mkdocs, pyspelling, markdownlint, textlint, linkspector, and aspell to ~/.ddev-dev-tools/.

The project’s .envrc automatically adds these tools to your PATH when you’re in the DDEV directory. If you want the tools available globally, add this to your shell profile (.bashrc, .bash_profile, or .zshrc):

export PATH="$HOME/.ddev-dev-tools/python/bin:$HOME/.ddev-dev-tools/node/bin:$PATH"

Alternatively, you can use the project-level .envrc installation method:

Install direnv with brew install direnv or sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y direnv or whatever technique is appropriate for your system.
Hook direnv into your shell, see docs.
Create global configuration for direnv in ~/.config/direnv/direnv.toml allowing it to be loaded without the direnv allow command, see docs, adjusting for your project path:

[global]
strict_env = true
[whitelist]
exact = ["~/workspace/ddev/.envrc"]

Recommended: Use the unified installation script for better performance and fewer per-project installations.

Preview Changes¶

Preview your changes locally by running make mkdocs-serve.

This will launch a web server on port 8000 and automatically refresh pages as they’re edited.

Installing mkdocs locally on macOS

On macOS with recent versions of Homebrew use this technique (or direnv above) to install mkdocs:

brew install pipx
export PIPX_BIN_DIR=/usr/local/bin
pipx install mkdocs
pipx runpip mkdocs install -r docs/mkdocs-pip-requirements
pipx ensurepath

Installing mkdocs locally on Debian/Ubuntu Linux or WSL2 with Ubuntu

On Debian/Ubuntu Linux or WSL2 with Ubuntu, use this technique (or direnv above) to install mkdocs:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python3-full python-is-python3 pipx
export PIPX_BIN_DIR=/usr/local/bin
export PIPX_HOME=/usr/local/pipx
sudo --preserve-env pipx install mkdocs --pip-args "-r docs/mkdocs-pip-requirements"

Check Markdown for Errors¶

Run make markdownlint before you publish changes to quickly check your files for errors or inconsistencies.

markdownlint-cli required!

The make markdownlint command requires you to have markdownlint-cli installed, which you can do by executing npm install -g markdownlint-cli or by using the direnv method above.

Check for Spelling Errors¶

Run make pyspelling to check for spelling errors. Output will be brief if all goes well:

➜  make pyspelling
pyspelling:
Spelling check passed :)

If you’ve added a correctly-spelled word that gets flagged, like “Symfony” for example, you’ll need to add it to .spellcheckwordlist.txt in the root of DDEV’s repository.

pyspelling and aspell required!

It’s probably best to install packages locally before attempting to run make pyspelling:

sudo -H pip3 install pyspelling pymdown-extensions
sudo apt-get install aspell

Check for Link Errors¶

Check external links using make linkspector.

Publish Changes¶

If all looks good, it’s time to commit your changes and make a pull request back into the official DDEV repository.

When you make a pull request, several tasks and test actions will be run. One of those is a task named docs/readthedocs.org:ddev, which builds a version of the docs containing all the changes from your pull request. You can use that to confirm the final result is exactly what you’d expect.