Blocknet Documentation

This repository contains the source code for Blocknet's documentation portal website. These documents are currently under progressive and iterative development.

Powered by MkDocs and MkDocs Material.

Contributing

To contribute to this project, follow the Fork-and-Branch Git Workflow: Fork this repository and in your own forked repository create a new branch off draft. In this new branch you can commit and push your updates by following the Editing guidelines stated below in this README. Following the MkDocs instructions below under Getting Started, you can also view how your changes will look when rendered by MkDocs to HTML. Once you're satisfied with the way your edits look in HTML, merge your new branch to your forked draft branch. Subsequently, create a pull request to merge from your forked repository draft branch into the original repository draft branch.

If you're not familiar enough with how to do this, feel free to create a Github issue with corrections, edits, or additions. If you have a lot of content to add, the best method would be to enter the content into a Google Doc (with settings set to public comments allowed) and link that in your Github issue.

Getting Started

MkDocs supports Python versions 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8 and pypy.

Using Linux, MacOS and Windows 10:

# go to directory where you want to clone the repository. (e.g., cd ./src/repos)

# clone this repo
git clone https://github.com/blocknetdx/documentation.git

# change directory to documentation

cd documentation

# create a virtual environment
python -m venv venv

# activate virtual environment
# for Linux and MacOS
source ./venv/bin/activate

# for Windows 10
.\venv\Scripts\activate.bat # cmd.exe
.\venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1 # PowerShell

# install dependencies in virtual environment
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Run dev server:

# use from within /documentation/
mkdocs serve

This will compile the docs and output the localhost address where the changes can be previewed:

$ mkdocs serve
INFO    -  Building documentation...
INFO    -  Cleaning site directory
[I 160402 15:50:43 server:271] Serving on http://127.0.0.1:8000
[I 160402 15:50:43 handlers:58] Start watching changes
[I 160402 15:50:43 handlers:60] Start detecting changes

You can now see the docs at http://127.0.0.1:8000/. This will reload automatically when changes are saved. Note that the address is not always the same so it's best to check the output for the correct address.

Exit the virtual environment:

deactivate

Editing

• Syntax - These documents use Markdown syntax along with additional syntax for specialty formatting:
  • Informational cards
  • Meta data
  • Snippets
  • Code superfences
• Content
  • For better navigation, instructions for different OS's should be nested in a collapsible panel.
  • Any repeatable sections should be made into a snippet.
  • Page sections should be separated with a diver line ---.
• Layout - The page meta tags are managed with theme/main.html and styling is managed in source/css/style.css.
• Informational Cards:
  • Types - note, abstract, info, tip, warning, danger, bug, example, quote
  • Standard - !!! type "title"
  • No Title - !!! type ""
  • Collapsible (default closed) - ??? type "title"
  • Collapsible (default open) - ???+ type "title"
• Formatting Conventions:
  • Styling:
    • Italics - Referencing menu/button text (Settings, Submit, Cancel, etc)
    • Bold+Italics - Word emphasis (available balances, fully unlock)
    • Bold - Sub-subsection titles
    • __Bold Bullet Point__
    • inline code - Reference code, commands (servicenode list), calls (dxGetOrders), file contents (ExchangeWallets=), state (finished), parameters (dryrun) , files (blocknet.conf), directories (Blocknet/)
    • ```code block``` - Multiline code or fule contents or anything that might need to be copied such as single line commands.
  • Images - ![optional alt text](imagelink "optional hover text")
  • Spacing:
    • Do not skip a line after section headers.
    • Tables require a newline above and below them for parsing/formatting.
    • Informational panels require a newline above and below them for parsing/formatting.
    • Lists require a newline above and below them for parsing/formatting.
• Internal Linking:
  • Correct:
    • [](/folder_path/page)
    • [](/folder_path/page#section)
    • [](/folder_path/page/)
    • [](/folder_path/page/#section)
  • Incorrect:
    • [](folder_path/page)
    • [](folder_path/page#section)
    • [](../folder_path/page)
    • [](../folder_path/page#section)
    • [](/folder_path/page.md)
    • [](/folder_path/page.md#section)
    • [](/folder_path/page.html)
    • [](/folder_path/page.html#section)

See full wiki: [MkDocs]](https://www.mkdocs.org/) | MkDocs Material

Adding Pages

1. Create a markdown file (.md) within one of the directories in the source/ folder.
2. Add a title: and description: at the top of the file.
3. Add an --8<-- "extras.md" tag at the end of the file.
4. Add a link to the menu (if needed) by listing it under nav: in mkdocs.yml.
5. Preview the page to make sure everything is rendering correctly.

Creating and Using Snippets

1. Create a markdown file (.md) within the snippets/ directory.
2. Use --8<-- "snippetfilename.md" tag to embed the snippet in a page.
   • The filenames are relative to the snippets/ directory.
3. Preview the page to make sure everything is rendering correctly.

Publishing

1. Build the docs with the mkdocs build command. This will render the website's html files in the docs/ directory.
2. In the docs/ directory, remove any folders and subfolders that begin with -. This prefix is manually used to flag pages that have not been completed yet.
3. Deploy docs/ contents to staging site for testing.
4. Deploy docs/ contents to https://docs.blocknet.org/ by commiting the changes in docs/ directory, then pushing the commit to the master branch of the documentation repo.

Note, if you don't have permissions to push to master branch of the documentation repo, you'll need to push to a branch or fork of it, then make a Pull Request to have your changes merged to master branch.

Hint: If you haven't yet committed your changes to markdown (.md) files, and you want to review all your changes using git utilities like git status and git diff, you can exclude all the changes in the docs folder from being considered by these tools by temporarily adding docs/ to the .gitignore file.