This repository contains the source code for the Zipkin documentation site
https://zipkin.apache.org/. It's the
organization page
for openzipkin
, hosted using
GitHub pages and Jekyll.
This means that everything on the master
branch is immediately and
automatically published.
It uses the static site generator Jekyll. Jekyll is implemented in Ruby and requires Ruby version >= 2.1.
Improvements to the documentation are more than welcome. This section tries to get you up to speed on how to run the site locally and make changes. Just like the documentation, this meta-documentation also welcomes all improvements. If you can, you should use OSX or Linux; Jekyll is not very well supported on Windows.
- Fork, branch, clone
bundle
jekyll serve
- Make changes, commit, push
- Open a pull-request
-
Install Ruby
The official documentation at https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/installation/ describes the procedure for all major operating systems.
-
System-level dependencies
Nokogiri, one of the components used by Jekyll, requires some system-level libraries to be in place before installation of Jekyll can begin. Things should generally work out of the box, but keep in mind that if Jekyll installation fails referencing Nokogiri, then the Installing Nokogiri document most likely has what you need.
-
Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/openzipkin/openzipkin.github.io.git
-
Install Jekyll and friends
GitHub quite considerately provides the exact list of packages that are used to generate the site on GitHub Pages, which means we can use the exact same packages when running the site locally. This minimizes differences between what you see locally, and what you'll see in production.
Gemfile
defines the packages to be installed using the list provided by GitHub (andGemfile.lock
makes sure we all have the same versions locally). To install these packages:cd openzipkin.github.io bundle
-
Run the site
You're now all set! The following command starts Jekyll, and makes the site available at http://localhost:4000. It'll also pick up any changes you make locally, and regenerate the site, so you can review your changes live without having to restart Jekyll.
jekyll serve
Next up is making some changes to the site. To do that, you'll need to have a basic understanding of how the repository is structured.
Content for all the pages lives in the pages
directory. This makes it
very clear where you need to look when making changes to the website text; it's
clearly separated from all the scaffolding around the actual content. The only
exception is the home page, index.md
. It's in the root of the
repository for purely technical reasons (GitHub Pages can only serve the root
document from the root of the repository, and doesn't allow running any Jekyll
plugins).
The rest of the repository contains scaffolding; here's a list to give you a basic idea of what's what:
_data
contains lists of things that are rendered into various parts of the page. For instance the list of tracers and instrumentation is defined here in a structured way._includes
contains HTML snippets that are shared by some or all pages._layouts
contains the basic HTML shared by all pages - and references snippets in_includes
. At the time of writing, all pages use thepage
layout, and I don't foresee new layouts becoming actively used._sass
contains style-sheets implemented inSass
.public
contains static content that's directly served to browsers as-is..editorconfig
contains EditorConfig configuration that makes sure editors supporting EditorConfig format files in this repository in the same way (think spaces vs tabs)CNAME
tells GitHub pages that this site should be served at http://zipkin.io instead of http://openzipkin.zipkin.io. For details on how, see [https://help.github.com/articles/using-a-custom-domain-with-github-pages/](Using a custom domain with GitHub Pages)Gemfile
andGemfile.lock
describe the Ruby packages used for building and serving this site; see the documentation of Bundler for more details._config.yml
contains configuration options used by Jekyll when generating the site.
There are a few things to keep an eye out for while making changes to the site.
- For links to work correctly both locally, on forks, and in production, we
need to include
{{ site.github.url }}
at the beginning of URLs. For example, a link to the Quickstart guide looks like this:{{ site.github.url }}/pages/quickstart
. This is expanded by Jekyll to the correct value based on where it's running. More documentation is available here - A link to each page appears in the side-bar. The links are ordered based on a
custom value
weight
assigned to each page. By default each page has a weight of 100 - the default is defined in_config.yml
. This can be overridden in each page, seeindex.md
for an example. Pages with lower weight come first in the list. Pages with the same weight are sorted however Jekyll sees fit - probably alphabetically. * This is implemented by custom logic for in_includes/sidebar.html
. As we add more content, we may want to add more structure to the side-bar, and we may need to re-think this approach. Worst case, we can manage the side-bar contents manually.
Once you've made your changes, you'll want to create a pull-request, so that the
changes can be merged into the master
branch of
openzipkin/openzipkin.github.io
, and so published for the betterment of all.
This section describes the steps for getting there, assuming you've followed the
instructions so far.
-
Fork this repository
Go to openzipkin/openzipkin.github.io, and click the "Fork" button. Or just click here.
-
Tell git about your fork
We're going to call your fork
origin
, and the originalopenzipkin
repositoryupstream
. The following commands tellgit
to make the appropriate changes:git remote rename origin upstream git remote add origin [email protected]:$USER/openzipkin.github.io git fetch upstream
-
Create a branch, commit and push your changes
git checkout -b my-awesome-changes git commit -m 'Short, useful description of my changes' git push
-
Open a pull-request
Open https://github.com/openzipkin/openzipkin.github.io. You should see a bar above the list of files that says you've recently pushed to your branch, with a green button on the right to open a pull request. Click it; add text to text fields and click buttons as appropriate. See https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests/ for detailed instructions.
When you come back to the project later, you'll want to make sure you have all the recent changes downloaded before making any further changes. Note: the following commands throw away any and all changes you have locally. If that's not desired, refer to the documentation of your git client.
git checkout master
git fetch upstream
git reset --hard upstream/master
git push
You'll also want to make sure you have all the required Ruby packages, at exactly the required versions:
bundle
You are now ready to start a new branch and add more awesome to the documentation.