Docker Documentation

The source for Docker documentation is here under sources/ and uses extended Markdown, as implemented by MkDocs.

The HTML files are built and hosted on https://docs.docker.com, and update automatically after each change to the master or release branch of Docker on GitHub thanks to post-commit hooks. The docs branch maps to the "latest" documentation and the master (unreleased development) branch maps to the "master" documentation.

Contributing

Be sure to follow the contribution guidelines. In particular, remember to sign your work!

Getting Started

Docker documentation builds are done in a Docker container, which installs all the required tools, adds the local docs/ directory and builds the HTML docs. It then starts a HTTP server on port 8000 so that you can connect and see your changes.

In the root of the docker source directory:

$ make docs
.... (lots of output) ....
docker run --rm -it  -e AWS_S3_BUCKET -p 8000:8000 "docker-docs:master" mkdocs serve
Running at: http://0.0.0.0:8000/
Live reload enabled.
Hold ctrl+c to quit.

If you have any issues you need to debug, you can use make docs-shell and then run mkdocs serve

Testing the links

You can use make docs-test to generate a report of missing links that are referenced in the documentation - there should be none.

Adding a new document

New document (.md) files are added to the documentation builds by adding them to the menu definition in the docs/mkdocs.yml file.

Style guide

If you have questions about how to write for Docker's documentation (e.g., questions about grammar, syntax, formatting, styling, language, or tone) please see the style guide. If something isn't clear in the guide, please submit a PR to help us improve it.

Working using GitHub's file editor

Alternatively, for small changes and typos you might want to use GitHub's built- in file editor. It allows you to preview your changes right on-line (though there can be some differences between GitHub Markdown and MkDocs Markdown). Just be careful not to create many commits. And you must still sign your work!

Branches

There are two branches related to editing docs: master and docs. You should always edit the documentation on a local branch of the master branch, and send a PR against master.

That way your fixes will automatically get included in later releases, and docs maintainers can easily cherry-pick your changes into the docs release branch. In the rare case where your change is not forward-compatible, you may need to base your changes on the docs branch.

Also, now that we have a docs branch, we can keep the http://docs.docker.com docs up to date with any bugs found between Docker code releases.

Warning: When reading the docs, the http://docs-stage.docker.com documentation may include features not yet part of any official Docker release. The beta-docs site should be used only for understanding bleeding-edge development and docs.docker.com (which points to the docs branch`) should be used for the latest official release.

Publishing Documentation

To publish a copy of the documentation you need to have Docker up and running on your machine. You'll also need a docs/awsconfig file containing the settings you need to access the AWS bucket you'll be deploying to.

The release script will create an s3 if needed, and will then push the files to it.

[profile dowideit-docs]
aws_access_key_id = IHOIUAHSIDH234rwf....
aws_secret_access_key = OIUYSADJHLKUHQWIUHE......
region = ap-southeast-2

The profile name must be the same as the name of the bucket you are deploying to - which you call from the docker directory:

make AWS_S3_BUCKET=dowideit-docs docs-release

This will publish only to the http://bucket-url/v1.2/ version of the documentation.

If you're publishing the current release's documentation, you need to also update the root docs pages by running

make AWS_S3_BUCKET=dowideit-docs BUILD_ROOT=yes docs-release

Note: if you are using Boot2Docker on OSX and the above command returns an error, Post http:///var/run/docker.sock/build?rm=1&t=docker-docs%3Apost-1.2.0-docs_update-2: dial unix /var/run/docker.sock: no such file or directory', you need to set the Docker host. Run $(boot2docker shellinit)to see the correct variable to set. The command will return the fullexport` command, so you can just cut and paste.

Cherry-picking documentation changes to update an existing release.

Whenever the core team makes a release, they publish the documentation based on the release branch (which is copied into the docs branch). The documentation team can make updates in the meantime, by cherry-picking changes from master into any of the docs branches.

For example, to update the current release's docs:

git fetch upstream
git checkout -b post-1.2.0-docs-update-1 upstream/docs
# Then go through the Merge commit linked to PR's (making sure they apply
to that release)
# see https://github.com/docker/docker/commits/master
git cherry-pick -x fe845c4
# Repeat until you have cherry picked everything you will propose to be merged
git push upstream post-1.2.0-docs-update-1

Then make a pull request to merge into the docs branch, NOT into master.

Once the PR has the needed LGTMs, merge it, then publish to our beta server to test:

git fetch upstream
git checkout docs
git reset --hard upstream/docs
make AWS_S3_BUCKET=beta-docs.docker.io BUILD_ROOT=yes docs-release

Then go to http://beta-docs.docker.io.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ to view your results and make sure what you published is what you wanted.

When you're happy with it, publish the docs to our live site:

make AWS_S3_BUCKET=docs.docker.com BUILD_ROOT=yes DISTRIBUTION_ID=C2K6......FL2F docs-release

Test the uncached version of the live docs at http://docs.docker.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

Note that the new docs will not appear live on the site until the cache (a complex, distributed CDN system) is flushed. The make docs-release command will do this if the DISTRIBUTION_ID is set to the Cloudfront distribution ID (ask the meta team) - this will take at least 15 minutes to run and you can check its progress with the CDN Cloudfront Chrome addin.