Documentation Style Guide

How to contribute to the docs

We use Hugo to format and generate our website, the Docsy theme for styling and site structure, and Github Actions to manage the deployment of the site. Hugo is an open-source static site generator that provides us with templates, content organisation in a standard directory structure, and a website generation engine. You write the pages in Markdown (or HTML if you want), and Hugo wraps them up into a website.

All submissions, including submissions by project members, require review. We use GitHub pull requests for this purpose. Consult GitHub Help for more information on using pull requests.

Proposing & previewing your changes locally

If you want to run your own local Hugo server to preview your changes as you work:

  1. Follow the instructions in Getting started to install Hugo and any other tools you need. You’ll need at least Hugo version 0.45 (we recommend using the most recent available version), and it must be the extended version, which supports SCSS.

  2. Fork the Website repo repo into your own project, then create a local copy using git clone. Don’t forget to use --recurse-submodules or you won’t pull down some of the code you need to generate a working site.

    git clone --recurse-submodules --depth 1 https://github.com/BeamStackProj/beamstackproj.github.io

  3. Run hugo server in the site root directory. By default your site will be available at http://localhost:1313. Now that you’re serving your site locally, Hugo will watch for changes to the content and automatically refresh your site.

  4. Continue with the usual GitHub workflow to edit files, commit them, push the changes up to your fork, and create a pull request.

Creating an issue

If you’ve found a problem in the docs, but you’re not sure how to fix it yourself, please create an issue in the Website repo. You can also create an issue about a specific page by clicking the Create Issue button in the top right hand corner of the page.

Useful resources