The Chef Infra Server Documentation is deployed on https://docs.chef.io/server/ using Hugo and Netlify.

There are two steps to updating the Chef Infra Server documentation:

1. Update the documentation in the chef/chef-server repository.
2. Update the Chef Infra Server repository module in chef/chef-web-docs.

The fastest way to change the documentation is to edit a page on the GitHub website using the GitHub UI.

To perform edits using the GitHub UI, click on the [edit on GitHub] link at the top of the page that you want to edit. The link takes you to that topic's GitHub page. In GitHub, click on the pencil icon and make your changes. You can preview how they'll look right on the page ("Preview Changes" tab).

We also require contributors to include their DCO signoff in the comment section of every pull request, except for obvious fixes. You can add your DCO signoff to the comments by including Signed-off-by:, followed by your name and email address, like this:

Signed-off-by: Julia Child <juliachild@chef.io>

See our blog post for more information about the DCO and why we require it.

After you've added your DCO signoff, add a comment about your proposed change, then click on the "Propose file change" button at the bottom of the page and confirm your pull request. The CI system will do some checks and add a comment to your PR with the results.

The Chef documentation team can normally merge pull requests within seven days. We'll fix build errors before we merge, so you don't have to worry about passing all the CI checks, but it might add an extra few days. The important part is submitting your change.

We use Hugo modules to build Chef's documentation from multiple repositories. The documentation from those repositories are vendored in chef-web-docs.

When Chef Infra Server is promoted to stable, Expeditor will submit a pull request to chef/chef-web-docs to update the Infra Server documentation on docs.chef.io.

To update the Hugo module for documentation in chef/chef-server:

1. Make sure your documentation changes are merged into master in chef/chef-server.
2. Wait for Expeditor to submit a PR to chef/chef-web-docs after Chef Infra Server is promoted to stable.

If you need to manually update the Chef Infra Server documentation, contact your friendly local Docs Team who will update the Infra Server Hugo module for you.

We use Hugo, Go, NPM, go-swagger, and jq. You will need Hugo 0.61 or higher installed and running to build and view our documentation properly.

To install Hugo, NPM, and Go on Windows and macOS:

• On macOS run: brew tap go-swagger/go-swagger && brew install go-swagger hugo node go jq
• On Windows run: choco install hugo nodejs golang jq
  • See the Go-Swagger docs to install go-swagger

To install Hugo on Linux, run:

• apt install -y build-essential
• sudo apt-get install jq
• snap install node --classic --channel=12
• snap install hugo --channel=extended
• See the Go-Swagger docs to install go-swagger

1. (Optional) Install cspell

   To be able to run the optional make spellcheck task you'll need to install cspell:

   npm install -g cspell

There are two ways to preview the documentation in chef/chef-server:

• Submit a PR
• make serve

When you submit a PR to chef/chef-server, Netlify will build the documentation and add a notification to the GitHub pull request page. You can review your documentation changes as they would appear on docs.chef.io.

Running make serve will clone a copy of chef/chef-web-docs into docs-chef-io. That copy will be configured to build the Infra Server documentation from docs-chef-io and live reload if any changes are made while the Hugo server is running.

• Run make serve
• go to http://localhost:1313

If you have a local copy of chef-web-docs cloned into docs-chef-io, running make clean_all will delete chef-web-docs. Hugo will reinstall these the next time you run make serve.

Please keep all of the Chef Infra Server documentation in the content/server directory. To add a new Markdown file, run the following command from the docs-chef-io directory:

hugo new content/server/<filename>.md

This will create a draft page with enough front matter to get you going.

Hugo uses Goldmark which is a superset of Markdown that includes GitHub styled tables, task lists, and definition lists.

See our Style Guide for more information about formatting documentation using Markdown.

Use the layouts/shortcodes/chef-server directory to store shortcodes for reusable text.

Shortcodes from this repository can be used in documentation from any Chef repository. Store all shortcodes in the chef-server subdirectory to prevent naming collisions and to make shortcodes from this repository easier to find if they are used in other repositories.

To add a chef-server shortcode to a Markdown page, add {{% chef-server/FILENAME %}} without the .md file suffix to a page.

See our shortcode guide for more information.

The Chef Documentation site uses Hugo modules to load content directly from chef/chef-server/docs-chef-io. Every time chef/chef-server is promoted to stable, Expeditor submits a PR to chef-web-docs to update the version of the chef/chef-server repository that Hugo uses to build Chef Infra Server documentation on the Chef Documentation site. This is handled by the Expeditor subscriptions in the chef/chef-web-docs GitHub repository.

We love getting feedback, questions, or comments.

Email

Send an email to Chef-Docs@progress.com for documentation bugs, ideas, thoughts, and suggestions. This email address is not a support email address. If you need support, contact Chef Support.

GitHub issues

Submit an issue to the Infra Server repo for "important" documentation bugs that may need visibility among a larger group, especially in situations where a doc bug may also surface a product bug.

Submit an issue to chef-web-docs for doc feature requests and minor documentation issues.