jupyterhub/docs/source/contributing/docs.md

(contributing:docs)=

Contributing Documentation

Documentation is often more important than code. This page helps you get set up on how to contribute to JupyterHub's documentation.

We use Sphinx to build our documentation. It takes our documentation source files (written in Markedly Structured Text (MyST) and stored under the docs/source directory) and converts it into various formats for people to read.

Building documentation locally

To make sure the documentation you write or change renders correctly, it is good practice to test it locally.

You will need Python and Git installed. Installation details are avaiable at {ref}`contributing:setup`.

1. Install the packages required to build the docs.

   python3 -m pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
   python3 -m pip install sphinx-autobuild
   

2. Build the HTML version of the docs. This is the most commonly used output format, so verifying it renders correctly is usually good enough.

   sphinx-autobuild docs/source/ docs/_build/html
   

   This step will display any syntax or formatting errors in the documentation, along with the filename / line number in which they occurred. Fix them, and the HTML will be re-render automatically.

3. View the rendered documentation by opening http://127.0.0.1:8000 in a web browser.

(contributing-docs-conventions)=

Documentation conventions

This section lists various conventions we use in our documentation. This is a living document that grows over time, so feel free to add to it / change it!

Our entire documentation does not yet fully conform to these conventions yet, so help in making it so would be appreciated!

pip invocation

There are many ways to invoke a pip command, we recommend the following approach:

python3 -m pip

This invokes pip explicitly using the python3 binary that you are currently using. This is the recommended way to invoke pip in our documentation, since it is least likely to cause problems with python3 and pip being from different environments.

For more information on how to invoke pip commands, see the pip documentation.