PCF Partners Documentation Book

This project can create and publish the documentation for PCF Partners as a web application.

In this topic:

• What's in this Repo
• The Docs Toolchain
• Contributing to the Documentation
• Submitting a Pull Request
• Continuous Integration Technical Details
• Deployment Details
• Notes on the config.yml
• Determine Content Repos and Branches of a Book

Breaking Change: This book now uses a centralized layout repository, docs-layout-repo.
You must clone this repository to run bookbinder bind local.

The centralized layout repository is specified as the value of the layout_repo key in the config.yml file. Bookbinder uses this centralized layout repository by default, but files in the book's master_middleman/source directory override files in the centralized layout repository if they have the same name.

What's in this Repo

Here you'll find the configuration and templates for the PCF Partners documentation set published to docs.pivotal.io.

This repository does not contain the actual documentation content. Actual content is contained in the topic repositories listed in the config.yml file.

The master_middleman folder contains the templates used for publishing.

The Docs Toolchain

The Cloud Foundry documentation is written in markdown and published using the Bookbinder gem to generate the documentation as a web application with Middleman.

Bookbinder enables us to single-source docs content for multiple contexts.

So, for example, the docs for the Cloud Foundry command-line tool (cf CLI) exist in a single repo and are published to all three documentation sets:

• Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), PCF Services, PCF Partner Services, and PCF Add-ons
• run.pivotal
• Open Source

Contributing to the Documentation

The docs team prefers to receive documentation contributions as pull requests rather than having engineering teams push directly to the docs repos. This gives us a chance to review the changes for consistency and understand the new content.

If you are planning to initiate a large documentation effort, please coordinate with the docs team in advance to make sure we're not going to step on each other. You can reach the docs team by email at cf-docs@pivotal.io.

If you are trying to figure out where a particular bit of information should live, please reach out and ask. We're happy to help you ensure information goes to the right place.

Note that content often lives in more than one context. Please make sure that any contribution you offer takes these multiple contexts into account. So, for example, if you are working on docs that are also used in for open source, please do not refer to Pivotal's commercial offerings.

Submitting a Pull Request

This is a Bookbinder project. See its README for instructions on how edits are made.

Continuous Integration Technical Details

We deploy this documentation as an app using Concourse pipelines, at https://pubtools.ci.cf-app.com/pipelines/cf-current

Credential for our pipeline are stored in LastPass. Tarballs of the builds are stored on Amazon S3. Use the creds stored in LastPass to log in.

The CI status can be monitored via the Checkman application (Mac only).

Once installed, configure Checkman to be aware of the CI builds by putting the following in a file called ~/Checkman/bookbinder:

PCF Bind: concourse.check https://pubtools.ci.cf-app.com REPLACE-WITH-USERNAME REPLACE-WITH-PASSWORD cf-current pcfservices

Deployment Details

Staging and Production are both on run.pivotal.io:

• Staging
• Production

See the config.yml for details.

Notes on the config.yml

Template variables for the PCF docs are stored in a separate YML file, template_variables.yml, stored in the config folder.

The "sections" section of the config.yml file is organized as follows:

• First "sections" section contains all repos for PCF docs in the cloudfoundry org, in alphabetical order.
• Next "sections" section contains all repos for PCF docs in the pivotal-cf org, in alphabetical order.
• Next "sections" section contains the repo where we store product PDFs
• Next "sections" section contains all repos for non-PCF docs in the pivotal-cf org, in alphabetical order.
• Next "sections" section contains all repos for non-PCF docs in the other orgs, in alphabetical order.

Determine Content Repos and Branches of a Book

The config.yml defines the content repos for each book. The config.yml file of each book contains the list of content repos and branches that appear in the doc set. In the config.yml file, each content repo is specified in the repository subsection. This subsection includes an optional ref key-value pair which defines the branch of the content repo the book uses.

Make sure that you are adding your content to the correct branches of the content repos.

To determine which branch of a content repo a book version uses:

1. Confirm that you are on the correct book branch. For example, the currently published doc might be on the master branch or on the branch corresponding to its version number.

2. Open the config.yml file.

3. Search for the name of the content repo, for example, docs-cloudfoundry-concepts.

4. Review the repository subsection for the content repo. If there is no ref: tag, then the repo uses the master branch. If there is a ref key-value pair, it specifies the branch name of the content repo. For example,

- repository:
  name: cloudfoundry/docs-cloudfoundry-concepts
  ref: '225'

ref: '225' refers to the 225 branch of the docs-cloudfoundry-concepts repo. Cloud Foundry v225 is associated with the PCF v1.6 release.