Contributing to the Documentation

Setup Local Build

To get started, create or identify a working directory on your local machine.

Open that directory and execute the following command in a terminal session:

git clone https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit.git

That will create an /scancode-toolkit directory in your working directory. Now you can install the dependencies in a virtualenv:

cd scancode-toolkit
./configure --docs

Note

In case of windows, run configure --docs instead of this.

Now, this will install the following prerequisites:

• Sphinx

• sphinx_rtd_theme (the format theme used by ReadTheDocs)

• docs8 (style linter)

These requirements are already present in setup.cfg and ./configure –docs installs them.

Now you can build the HTML documents locally:

source venv/bin/activate
cd docs
make html

Assuming that your Sphinx installation was successful, Sphinx should build a local instance of the documentation .html files:

open build/html/index.html

Note

In case this command did not work, for example on Ubuntu 18.04 you may get a message like “Couldn’t get a file descriptor referring to the console”, try:

see build/html/index.html

You now have a local build of the AboutCode documents.

Share Document Improvements

Ensure that you have the latest files:

git pull
git status

Before commiting changes run Continious Integration Scripts locally to run tests. Refer Continuous Integration for instructions on the same.

Follow standard git procedures to upload your new and modified files. The following commands are examples:

git status
git add source/index.rst
git add source/how-to-scan.rst
git status
git commit -m "New how-to document that explains how to scan"
git status
git push
git status

The Scancode-Toolkit webhook with ReadTheDocs should rebuild the documentation after your Pull Request is Merged.

Refer the Pro Git Book available online for Git tutorials covering more complex topics on Branching, Merging, Rebasing etc.

Continuous Integration

The documentations are checked on every new commit through Travis-CI, so that common errors are avoided and documentation standards are enforced. Travis-CI presently checks for these 3 aspects of the documentation :

1. Successful Builds (By using sphinx-build)

2. No Broken Links (By Using link-check)

3. Linting Errors (By Using Doc8)

So run these scripts at your local system before creating a Pull Request:

cd docs
./scripts/sphinx_build_link_check.sh
./scripts/doc8_style_check.sh

If you don’t have permission to run the scripts, run:

chmod u+x ./scripts/doc8_style_check.sh

Style Checks Using Doc8

How To Run Style Tests

In the project root, run the following commands:

$ cd docs
$ ./scripts/doc8_style_check.sh

A sample output is:

Scanning...
Validating...
docs/source/misc/licence_policy_plugin.rst:37: D002 Trailing whitespace
docs/source/misc/faq.rst:45: D003 Tabulation used for indentation
docs/source/misc/faq.rst:9: D001 Line too long
docs/source/misc/support.rst:6: D005 No newline at end of file
========
Total files scanned = 34
Total files ignored = 0
Total accumulated errors = 326
Detailed error counts:
    - CheckCarriageReturn = 0
    - CheckIndentationNoTab = 75
    - CheckMaxLineLength = 190
    - CheckNewlineEndOfFile = 13
    - CheckTrailingWhitespace = 47
    - CheckValidity = 1

Now fix the errors and run again till there isn’t any style error in the documentation.

What is Checked?

PyCQA is an Organization for code quality tools (and plugins) for the Python programming language. Doc8 is a sub-project of the same Organization. Refer this README for more details.

What is checked:

• invalid rst format - D000

• lines should not be longer than 100 characters - D001

  • RST exception: line with no whitespace except in the beginning

  • RST exception: lines with http or https URLs

  • RST exception: literal blocks

  • RST exception: rst target directives

• no trailing whitespace - D002

• no tabulation for indentation - D003

• no carriage returns (use UNIX newlines) - D004

• no newline at end of file - D005

Interspinx

ScanCode toolkit documentation uses Intersphinx to link to other Sphinx Documentations, to maintain links to other Aboutcode Projects.

To link sections in the same documentation, standart reST labels are used. Refer Cross-Referencing for more information.

For example:

.. _my-reference-label:

Section to cross-reference
--------------------------

This is the text of the section.

It refers to the section itself, see :ref:`my-reference-label`.

Now, using Intersphinx, you can create these labels in one Sphinx Documentation and then referance these labels from another Sphinx Documentation, hosted in different locations.

You just have to add the following in the conf.py file for your Sphinx Documentation, where you want to add the links:

extensions = [
'sphinx.ext.intersphinx'
]

intersphinx_mapping = {'aboutcode': ('https://aboutcode.readthedocs.io/en/latest/', None)}

To show all Intersphinx links and their targets of an Intersphinx mapping file, run:

python -msphinx.ext.intersphinx https://aboutcode.readthedocs.io/en/latest/objects.inv

Warning

python -msphinx.ext.intersphinx https://aboutcode.readthedocs.io/objects.inv will give error.

This enables you to create links to the aboutcode Documentation in your own Documentation, where you modified the configuration file. Links can be added like this:

For more details refer :ref:`aboutcode:doc_style_guide`.

You can also not use the aboutcode label assigned to all links from aboutcode.readthedocs.io, if you don’t have a label having the same name in your Sphinx Documentation. Example:

For more details refer :ref:`doc_style_guide`.

If you have a label in your documentation which is also present in the documentation linked by Intersphinx, and you link to that label, it will create a link to the local label.

For more information, refer this tutorial named Using Intersphinx.

Style Conventions for the Documentaion

1. Headings

   (Refer) Normally, there are no heading levels assigned to certain characters as the structure is determined from the succession of headings. However, this convention is used in Python’s Style Guide for documenting which you may follow:

   # with overline, for parts

   • with overline, for chapters

   =, for sections

   -, for subsections

   ^, for sub-subsections

   “, for paragraphs

2. Heading Underlines

   Do not use underlines that are longer/shorter than the title headline itself. As in:

   Correct :
   
   Extra Style Checks
   ------------------
   
   Incorrect :
   
   Extra Style Checks
   ------------------------
   

Note

Underlines shorter than the Title text generates Errors on sphinx-build.

3. Internal Links

   Using :ref: is advised over standard reStructuredText links to sections (like `Section title`_) because it works across files, when section headings are changed, will raise warnings if incorrect, and works for all builders that support cross-references. However, external links are created by using the standard `Section title`_ method.

4. Eliminate Redundancy

   If a section/file has to be repeated somewhere else, do not write the exact same section/file twice. Use .. include: ../README.rst instead. Here, ../ refers to the documentation root, so file location can be used accordingly. This enables us to link documents from other upstream folders.

5. Using :ref: only when necessary

   Use :ref: to create internal links only when needed, i.e. it is referenced somewhere. Do not create references for all the sections and then only reference some of them, because this created unnecessary references. This also generates ERROR in restructuredtext-lint.

6. Spelling

   You should check for spelling errors before you push changes. Aspell is a GNU project Command Line tool you can use for this purpose. Download and install Aspell, then execute aspell check <file-name> for all the files changed. Be careful about not changing commands or other stuff as Aspell gives prompts for a lot of them. Also delete the temporary .bak files generated. Refer the manual for more information on how to use.

7. Notes and Warning Snippets

   Every Note and Warning sections are to be kept in rst_snippets/note_snippets/ and rst_snippets/warning_snippets/ and then included to eliminate redundancy, as these are frequently used in multiple files.

8. Redirects

   If layouts of doc pages are being changed and these could be referenced elsewhere, these should be added in the redirects mapping in conf.py. For examples on using these see https://documatt.gitlab.io/sphinx-reredirects/usage.html

Converting from Markdown

If you want to convert a .md file to a .rst file, this tool does it pretty well. You’d still have to clean up and check for errors as this contains a lot of bugs. But this is definitely better than converting everything by yourself.

This will be helpful in converting GitHub wiki’s (Markdown Files) to reStructuredtext files for Sphinx/ReadTheDocs hosting.

Automatic Docs Generation

It’s possible to generate docs automatically from data by using a combination of:

• shell scripts: example

• python scripts: example

• jinja templates: example

And we do this currently to keep a documentation page for all the supported package formats. See Supported package manifests and package datafiles for details.