Documentation

Good documentation is just as important as good code.[1] CIDER is a pretty complex project with numerous features and the user manual is one of the primary ways to discover those. Please, consider improving and extending it.

Overview

The manual is generated from the AsciiDoc files in the doc folder of CIDER’s GitHub repo and is published to https://docs.cider.mx. Antora is used to convert the AsciiDoc source into HTML. Antora’s filesystem layout is described here.

Installing Antora

The instructions here assume you already have (the right version of) node.js installed.

Installing the Antora is super simple:

$ npm install

Check out the detailed installation instructions if you run into any problems.

Editing the Docs

If you want to make changes to the manual’s page structure you’ll have to edit nav.adoc.

Building the Docs Site

To make changes to the manual you simply have to change the files under doc.

You can build the documentation locally from the docs.cider.mx repo.

$ git clone https://github.com/clojure-emacs/docs.cider.mx
$ cd docs.cider.mx
$ make build

To check the generated site you can simply open build/site/index.html in your favourite browser.

Deploying the Docs Site

The manual will be regenerated manually periodically by CIDER’s Core Team.

We’re currently publishing the user manual to GitHub Pages. The deployment is handled by a GitHub Actions workflow that builds and deploys the documentation every time something is changed in the documentation site’s repository. It can also be triggered manually if needed.

Updating the Playbook

The docs site only builds the release tags listed in its playbook. After cutting a CIDER release, run the site’s publish workflow manually with cider and the new tag (e.g. v2.1.0). It adds the tag to the playbook and publishes the release’s docs. A patch release replaces the docs of its minor version.

There’s nothing to change in doc/antora.yml for a release: the docs version comes from the tag (v2.1.0 becomes 2.1).

Fixing the Docs of a Release

A release tag can’t be changed, so a fix to the docs of a release that’s already out goes on an -antora tag: a commit with the fix on top of the release tag, tagged vX.Y.Z-antora, which replaces the release tag in the playbook.

1. If not even more important.