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 and Content

All markdown files are part of this repository. However, all images are added to the website repository. Therefore, the process of adding images is not as straightforward. These are the steps:

1. Ensure you create a feature branch within the website repository to make the change. This branch needs to be based on the old-docs branch.
2. Ensure the image(s) are compressed and optimised e.g. Using tinypng.
3. Add the image(s) to the /static/img/docs directory.
4. Then, make a commit that adds the image(s).
5. The Pull Request you create needs to target where you branched off, the branch old-docs.

Finally, run:

make docs-build

This will rebuild the docs Docker image.

To be able to use your image(s) 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(s).

Editing content

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

Troubleshooting

Running make watch errors out with Warning: Task "default" not found.

Ensure that the Docker image from the website repository is built using the old-docs branch.