LibreSign Documentation

Documentation is published on https://docs.libresign.coop. To edit it yourself, you need to tinker a bit with Git and Sphinx. See the Style Guide for formatting and style conventions.

Manuals

This repository hosts three manuals:

• Users' Manual
• Administration Manual
• Developers Manual

Please wrap lines at 80 characters.

Spelling and Capitalization Conventions

• Nextcloud
• LibreSign

License

All documentation in this repository is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0).

Style

Source files are written using the Sphinx Documentation Generator. The syntax follows the reStructuredText style, and can also be edited from GitHub.

Structure

Of course, think about structure. Keep in mind that we try NOT to move or rename pages once they are created! Lots of external sources link to our documentation, including the indexing by search engines of course. So once you create a page with a certain name, it has to stay in that location and with that name. Think of it as API stability - we have to ensure things stay as they are as much as possible. Renaming or moving is only allowed in exceptional circumstances and only when a redirect is put in place.

Editing

Contributing to the documentation requires a GitHub account.

To edit a document, you can edit the .rst files on your local system, or work directly on GitHub. The latter is only suitable for small fixes and improvements because substantial editing efforts can better be controlled on your local PC.

The best way is to install a complete Sphinx build environment and work on your local PC or using the docker-compose that stay at home folder of this repository. You will be able to make your own local builds, which is the fastest and best way to preview for errors. Sphinx will report syntax errors, missing images, and formatting errors. The GitHub preview is not complete and misses many mistakes. Create a new branch against the main, make your edits, then push your new branch to GitHub and open a new PR.

To edit on GitHub, fork the repository (see top-right of the screen, under your username). You will then be able to make changes easily. Once done, you can create a pull request and get the changes reviewed and back into the official repository.

When editing either on your own local PC or on GitHub, be sure to sign of commits, to certify adherence to the Developer Certificate of Origin, see https://github.com/probot/dco . Your commit messages need to have, the name and email address of the contributor.

Signed-off-by: Awesome Contributor <[email protected]>

If using the command line and your name and email are configured, you can use

git commit -s -m 'Commit message'

In both settings be sure that your email address matches that in your GitHub profile, which if you have privacy enabled will be [email protected]

Building

Building HTML

Using pipenv

1. Install pipenv - https://pipenv.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
2. Change into the environment: pipenv shell
3. Install the dependencies pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
4. Now you can use make ... to build all the stuff - for example make html to build the HTML flavor of all manuals The build assets will be put into the individual documentation subdirectories like developer_manual/_build/html/com

To change into this environment you need to run pipenv shell to launch the shell and to exit you can use either exit or Ctrl + D.

Using venv

1. Install python3-venv
2. Only once: Create a venv (typically inside this repository): python -m venv venv
3. Activate the environment (inside this repository): source venv/bin/activate
4. Install the dependencies pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
5. Now you can use make ... to build all the stuff - for example make html to build the HTML flavor of all manuals The build assets will be put into the individual documentation subdirectories like developer_manual/_build/html/com

Autobuilding

When editing the documentation installing sphinx-autobuild though pip can be helpful. This will watch file changes and automatically reload the html preview:

1. Install pip install sphinx-autobuild
2. Enter the documentation section cd user_manual
3. Watch for file changes make SPHINXBUILD=sphinx-autobuild html
4. Open http://127.0.0.1:8000 in the browser and start editing

Using the VSCode DevContainer

This repository contains a full-featured VSCode DevContainer. You can use it in your local development environment or via GitHub Codespaces. Just open the container an use one of the commands from above to build the project. For example make to build the full documentation. You can also use make SPHINXBUILD=sphinx-autobuild html in combination with port forwarding to watch file changes and automatically reload the html preview.

Usign docker

You can also use the docker-compose.yml file to build the documentation using Docker. This is useful if you want to avoid installing Python and its dependencies on your local machine.

1. Make sure you have Docker and Docker Compose installed.

2. Open a terminal and navigate to the root directory of the repository.

3. Run the following command to build the documentation:

   docker-compose up

   This will build the HTML documentation and place it in the volumes/html directory. And also will start a HTTP server and you can access the documentation at http://localhost:8000.

4. To stop the server, press Ctrl+C in the terminal.

This README was based on the Nextcloud documentation.