grafana/docs

Note for external contributors

We are currently working on migrating the docs to a new static website. The grafana/website repository will be private during this migration, which unfortunately means the docs site can't be built without access.

The Markdown content however, is still public in this repository. We still encourage pull requests to make the docs better, and we will make sure the changed content works well on the current docs site. Include any images in your pull request, and we will move them to the grafana/website repository.

Building the docs

To build the docs locally, you need to have docker installed. The docs are built using Hugo - a static site generator.

Prepare the Docker Image:

Due to migration to new static site, the docker image needs to be built from old-docs branch.

Git clone grafana/website repo. Run these commands in the root of that repo. Note that you may require sudo when running make docs-build depending on how your system's docker service is configured):

git clone https://github.com/grafana/website
cd website
make docs-build

Build the Documentation:

Now that the docker image has been prepared we can build the grafana docs and start a docs server.

If you have not cloned the Grafana repository already then:

cd ..
git clone https://github.com/grafana/grafana

Switch your working directory to the directory this file (README.md) is in.

cd grafana/docs

An AWS config file is required to build the docs Docker image and to publish the site to AWS. If you are building locally only and do not have any AWS credentials for docs.grafana.org then create an empty file named awsconfig in the current directory.

touch awsconfig

Then run (possibly with sudo):

make watch

This command will not return control of the shell to the user. Instead the command is now running a new docker container built from the image we created in the previous step.

Open localhost:3004 to view the docs.

Images & Content

All markdown files are located in this repo (main grafana repo). But all images are added to the https://github.com/grafana/website repo. So the process of adding images is a bit complicated.

First you need create a feature (PR) branch of https://github.com/grafana/website so you can make change. Then add the image to the /static/img/docs directory. Then make a commit that adds the image.

Then run:

make docs-build

This will rebuild the docs docker container.

To be able to use the image you have to quit (CTRL-C) the make watch command (that you run in the same directory as this README). Then simply rerun make watch, it will restart the docs server but now with access to your image.

Editing content

Changes to the markdown files should automatically cause a docs rebuild and live reload should reload the page in your browser.