Publishing documentation

A project's documentation lives in its own repository. The add-doc.yaml reusable workflow copies it into this site every time master builds.

warning

Never edit docs/php, docs/devops, docs/js or docs/archived in this repository. The workflow deletes and re-copies a project's folder on every publish, so edits made here are lost. Change the source repository instead.

Add the job

Add a job to the project's workflow, after the job that runs the tests:

  Documentation:
    if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/master'
    needs: Build
    uses: byjg/byjg.github.io/.github/workflows/add-doc.yaml@master
    with:
      folder: php
      project: ${{ github.event.repository.name }}
    secrets:
      DOC_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.DOC_TOKEN }}

Input	Required	Meaning
folder	yes	Site section: php, js, devops or archived
project	yes	Repository name, without the owner
owner	no	Repository owner; defaults to byjg

To publish without a push -- a project with no job, or to republish -- run Add project to the documentation from the Actions tab of this repository and fill in the same inputs.

Where it lands

The folder prefix is removed from the repository name to form the URL:

Repository	folder	Site path
php-micro-orm	php	docs/php/micro-orm
docker-easy-haproxy	devops	docs/devops/docker-easy-haproxy

Only README.md, docs/ and composer.json are read from the repository. What the site shows depends on whether docs/ exists:

Repository has	Site gets
README.md only	One page: docs/<folder>/<name>.md
README.md and docs/	A section: README.md becomes the index page, and everything under docs/ is copied next to it

The project's folder is deleted before copying, so a page removed from the repository also disappears from the site.

Repository layout

README.md                 index page of the project's section
docs/
  getting-started.md
  some-topic.md
  image.png               images live inside docs/ too
  guides/                 optional subfolders
    _category_.json
    first-guide.md

Anything outside README.md and docs/ is not copied. An image referenced from src/ or the repository root will be missing on the site.

Front matter

README.md

---
sidebar_key: micro-orm
tags: [php, databases, orm]
---

# MicroOrm

• sidebar_key -- the project name without the folder prefix. Every project's index page is a README.md; this key keeps their sidebar entries unique. For a project with docs/ whose README has no front matter, the workflow generates one with only sidebar_key -- but no tags. Write it yourself.
• tags -- must already exist in docs/tags.yml. An unknown tag produces a build warning. Add a new tag to tags.yml first.

Pages in docs/

---
sidebar_position: 3
---

# Querying the database

sidebar_position sets the order in the sidebar. title, sidebar_label and description are also used where the heading is not a good label.

A subfolder gets its label and order from a _category_.json:

{
  "label": "Getting Started",
  "position": 1,
  "link": {
    "type": "generated-index",
    "description": "Install and run your first example."
  }
}

Links

Write links that work on GitHub. The workflow rewrites them for the site:

In the repository	On the site
README: [Cache](docs/cache.md)	[Cache](cache)
docs page: [Cache](cache.md)	[Cache](cache)

• Link from the README into docs/ with the docs/ prefix, and between docs pages relative to the page.
• Do not link to files outside docs/ -- LICENSE, CHANGELOG, source files. They are not copied, so the link breaks. Use the full GitHub URL instead.

danger

The site build fails on any broken link. One bad link in one project's docs stops the whole site from deploying, for every project.

PHP dependency graph

For folder: php the workflow also reads composer.json and records the project's byjg/* dependencies -- from require, require-dev and suggest -- in data/dependencies/<name>.json. The graph on the PHP Components page is rebuilt from all recorded projects.

Nothing to maintain by hand: keep composer.json accurate. A hand-written ## Dependencies diagram in the README is not used for the graph.

Preview before publishing

To check a large change, copy it into a local clone of this repository and build the site. The build fails on the same broken links the real one would:

cd byjg.github.io
mkdir -p docs/php/my-project
cp -r ../php-my-project/docs/* docs/php/my-project/
sed 's~(docs/~(~g' ../php-my-project/README.md > docs/php/my-project/README.md
npm install
npm run build

Discard the copy afterwards; the workflow publishes the real one.

Checklist

• Documentation job runs on master only and needs: the test job
• README.md has front matter with sidebar_key and tags from tags.yml
• Every page in docs/ has sidebar_position
• Links stay inside README.md and docs/; images are inside docs/