SolarNode Handbook Source

This project is the source for the SolarNode Handbook.

Contributions welcome!

We welcome contributions to the SolarNode Handbook! Contributions can come in many forms and no contribution is too small:

• questions
• spelling corrections
• grammer suggestions
• translations
• clarifications
• additional details
• additional topics

Open an issue to start a discussion on your contribution. You can fork this repository and open a pull request to submit your updates.

Writing documentation

The documentation for the Handbook is written using the Markdown syntax, with several handy extensions to help make the documentation look beautiful. The Markdown is rendered into HTML using the MkDocs tool, using the Material for MkDocs theme. The Material for MkDocs site has good documentation on the various Markdown extensions that are supported.

Note that a great way to learn the documentation syntax is to view the source for the page where you see a feature that you would also like to use.

Overview

Document pages are created in the docs/ folder and must be named with a .md extension. Sub-folders are supported, and form sections within the overall Handbook. For example, here is a partial view of the docs/ folder structure:

docs/
├── .pages
├── developers/
│   ├── .pages
│   ├── index.md
│   ├── osgi/
│   ├── services/
│   └── settings/
├── index.md
└── users/
    ├── .pages
    ├── configuration.md
    ├── index.md
    ├── logging.md
    └── placeholders.md

Navigation

You will notice there are .pages files within each folder in the docs/ hierarchy. Those files are YAML configuration files that configure what navigation links should appear in the rendered Handbook. Their structure is quite simple, holding just a title property for the section title and nav property with a list of page links. For example a .pages file might look like this:

title: Developer Guide
nav:
    - index.md
    - osgi
    - settings
    - services

This ends up generating the Handbook navigation, that looks like this:

The structure of each navigation item (the lines starting with -) is

title: path

Where title is an optional friendly name to show in the Handbook and path is a relative path to a folder or file. In the given example, there are four navigation links defined. The first link is to the main section content index.md, and the second has a label Plugins and a path to the osgi folder.

Page titles

Navigation links can omit the title part of the link, in which case the title defined in the link destination page itself will be used. A page defines its title with an initial level-1 Markdown header, like this:

# This Is My Page Title

This is the first paragraph of the page.

## This Is A Level-2 Markdown Header

This is the first paragraph of the first sub-heading.

In that example, the page title is This Is My Page Title.

Sections

The top-level developers/ and users/ folders form the top-level Developers and Users sections within the Handbook. The index.md file within those folders holds the content for those sections.

Sub-sections

The osgi/, services/, and settings/ folders within the developers/ folder form sub-sections within the top-level Developers section. Sub-sections also start with an index.md file for their content.

Omitting a .pages file

Any section can omit its .pages file, in which case all the files within that section will be automatically included as navigation links, sorted by their titles.

Links

Links can be added to both internal Handbook pages and external resources. The basic structure of a Markdown link looks like this:

[label](url)

The label is the text to display and url is the URL to link to.

Internal links

Links to internal pages, and specific headers, are possible by using a relative path to the page file. For example if the developers/services/foo.md page needed a link to the users/bar.md page, the link would look like:

[link to bar](../../users/bar.md)

If bar.md had a header you wanted to link directly to, you can add a #header to the link URL where header is a lower-cased, non-standard-character-to-dash form of the header. For example if bar.md had a header like this:

## Important information

then a link to that header would be:

[link to bar header](../../users/bar.md#important-information)

Build requirements

• MkDocs
• mkdocs-awesome-pages-plugin
• mkdocs-enumerate-headings-plugin
• mkdocs-material
• mkdocs-open-in-new-tab

macOS

On macOS, you can install MkDocs with Homebrew, then use pip3 to install the Python packages:

brew install mkdocs
pip3 install mkdocs-awesome-pages-plugin mkdocs-enumerate-headings-plugin mkdocs-material mkdocs-open-in-new-tab

Building

To build and view the handbook on your own machine, run mkdocs serve. You can then view the handbook at http://localhost:8000/solarnode-handbook/.

To deploy the changes, run mkdocs gh-deploy.