Polymer docs are mostly in Markdown with some HTML. Jekyll is used to generate the static HTML for the site. The output is generated into a folder called _site and served from Google App Engine.

We use Jekyll 1.4.2+ and Grunt to generate the documentation. You'll need to install the requirements before working on the docs (these instructions assume NPM is already installed):

sudo gem install jekyll
sudo gem install kramdown
sudo npm install -g grunt-cli
npm install

You'll also need the App Engine SDK to run the dev_appserver and preview the docs locally. Download the SDK.

Checkout this repo:

git clone https://github.com/Polymer/docs.git --recursive

Create a directory polymer-all/projects and run the pull-all-projects.sh script in that directory:

cd docs/polymer-all
mkdir projects; cd projects
../tools/bin/pull-all-projects.sh

This populates projects with a bunch of repositories. You'll periodically need to re-run pull-all-projects.sh whenever the site is released.

Next, create a components folder in the top level docs directory and run pull-all-polymer.sh and pull-all-elements.sh in it:

cd ../..
mkdir components; cd components
../polymer-all/tools/bin/pull-all-polymer.sh
../polymer-all/tools/bin/pull-all-elements.sh

Note: these scripts can take some time to download.

You should now be able to build the docs successfully. Run this in the main folder:

grunt docs

This repo (Polymer/docs) is where the documentation source files live. To make a change:

1. First, up the App Engine dev server in this folder (dev_appserver.py .) to preview the docs.
2. Make your edits.
3. To build the docs, run grunt in base of the docs diretory you checked out. This starts up jekyll and watches for changes as you make edits. Be sure to run npm install in your docs directory if it's a new checkout. It can take some time for the docs to fully regenerate and be copied to the output folder...keep refreshing!

Jekyll generates the static site in a folder named _site. Note: If you're not running jekyll to rebuild the site, you won't see your changes in the dev server.

Once your changes look good, git commit them and push.

Note: only project owners can publish the documentation.

If you have things checked out correctly in components and polymer-all, you should be able to generate the prodcution documentation using:

grunt docs

It's a good idea to do this before pushing the docs, as it runs a number of grunt tasks. Verify things went well.

Last step is to push the docs to App Engine. In your Polymer/docs directory, run:

./scripts/deploy_site.sh

This script builds the site, api docs, runs Vulcanizer over the imports, and deploys to App Engine.