JetBrains Guide

The JetBrains Guide is a collection of resources for learning JetBrains IDEs. Similar to an "Awesome PyCharm" but richer in content and formatting. The Guide is intended as an open source project.

Technology

• Content is created as Markdown files.
• It's rendered to a semi-static site using Gatsby.
• All is available as open source.

Installation and Running the Guide

There are two types of installation, and they depend on what you want to achieve.

• Do you want to write content for the Guide? Use the Docker-based approach.
• Do you want to work on Guide infrastructure? Use the local approach.

Most probably, you want to use the Docker-based approach.

Docker-based approach - For content creators

Want to create content? Awesome! We like content. Here's what you need to get started:

• Clone this repository
• Open it with any JetBrains IDE (we tested with WebStorm)
• Make sure Docker is running, and Docker support is enabled in the IDE
• Run any of the Docker - * run configurations to launch a specific Guide (top toolbar, see web help for more info)
• Wait until the container is running and the console shows a URL (similar to http://localhost:8000/)
• Connect the browser to http://localhost:8000/
• Start authoring, and see reloads in the browser (after ~6 seconds)

This will build and run a Docker container for the Guide you want to work with, and mount the contents folder of that Guide as a volume inside the container.

For humans: if you launch Docker - IntelliJ Guide, you can work on any content in the sites/intellij/guide/contents directory of this repository.

Local approach - For Gatsby connoisseurs, and content enthusiasts that don't like containers

To set up a local development copy of this project, you will need:

• NodeJS 14.*
• Yarn

When those are in place, you will have to:

• Clone this repository and cd to the directory
• Run yarn to install dependencies
• Run yarn run pc:develop (where pc is the Guide you want to run, e.g. dotnet, intellij, and others)
• Connect the browser to http://localhost:8000/
• Start authoring, and see reloads in the browser

If you want to try building a new Docker image for content creators, open a terminal in the root of this repository and run:

docker build . -f Dockerfile-ContentCreators -t registry.jetbrains.team/p/evan/guide-containers/guide-content-creators:latest

Once finished, you can run the Docker from configurations to test out things.

Authoring

Let's talk authoring, which is where the value of the Guide gets created.

Working on Tips

• Go to src/{guide}/contents/tips
• Make a new directory with an index.md in it
• Make a card.png screenshot (400x200-ish) to be used in Twitter cards
• Make a thumbnail.png screenshot (square, preferably small)

The frontmatter lets you point to different filenames for images. In the frontmatter, put your author "label" as author (more on that in a second.) Put zero or more labels for technology and topic. (It's ok to leave those empty.)

For subtitle, keep it Twitter-ish in length. The leadin is a Markdown field which appears beside the short movie, as kind of a teaser.

You can also optionally do a sequence of seealso title/href pairs.

On the topic of shortMovie and longMovie. The shortMovie is intended for Twitter. It's the equivalent of and animated gif. Short, zoomed-in so it could sort-of be read on a phone.

At the time of this writing it is required, but that might change.

The longMovie is completely optional. It is intended to be big, narrated, and tell the story of the body text.

What goes in the body text? A deeper-dive on the tip: the problem it is solving, why you should give a crap, its variations, etc.

Tip:- R Install the PNG Optimizer plugin to make sure your PNG images are optimized in terms of file size. This speeds up (re)build time, and saves precious bandwidth. The plugin hooks into the commit tool window, and automatically runs optimization (when enabled).

Authors

Each Guide resource needs an author, so create a directory in src/{guide}/contents/authors and put an index.md in there.

For the directory name...don't use your personal name. We don't want personally-identifying information in log files, URLs in analytics, etc. As a convention, use your initials.

Put a square-aspect-ratio headshot in the directory to, then point to it from the frontmatter. Don't worry about size...Gatsby creates multiple responsively-sized images automatically.

The frontmatter for author includes something called label. This is a shortname for the author, sort of the category name. Anything that uses this author will use the label, not the filename. It's the key used for the reference. This applies to other category types as well: topic, technology.

Technology

This is a category type used for "software packages that people care about and search for." django is a good example, debugging is a bad one.

Each technology has a directory, and a Markdown file. Have a look at the existing ones to get an idea about how they are created.

Topic

Same as technology, but these are words use as jargon for the IDE. Somewhat like features and systems in our product. If you land on a tip about VCS, you might want to see lots more about VCS.

Playlist

Sometimes you want to group a subset of resources -- usually tips -- into an ordered sequence. You want the collection to have a URL, some explanation, and be tweeted and discoverable on its own.

Think "42 Tips and Tricks".

That's where a playlist comes in. It is a resource -- it has a thumbnail, a writeup, topics/technologies, authors, etc. -- that is a collection of other resources.

That's where the tricky bit comes in. You don't want a tip to appear to be "in" a playlist. Otherwise, Google would think there were three different URLs for a playlist. As you navigate a playlist, you want to stay in the context of a playlist.

To solve this, we keep a query string URL parameter as you navigate the items in the playlist, to let the system know which playlist this should render in. (This info is assembled client-side, as this is an SSG.) That same client-side logic determines previous/next and ToC information.

If you land on a tip without a query string, we do the following:

• See if the tip is in any playlists, and if so, use the first playlist
• If not, show the playlist as if standalone

Tutorials

A tutorial is a deep-dive on a topic. Multi-step with code, explanation, screenshots, and possibly videos on each step.

Note: if you are doing a tutorial that has code snippets in JSX or TSX, you can't put it in the tutorial step folder. Gatsby will think that's a page in the site.

Re-building and Deploying

To make a production build, run one of the build scripts, such as yarn run pc:build. This generates output in public/pycharm/guide (which is actually a symlink to the shared, cross-site, parent directory).

Thus, make sure to do a symlink from, for example, sites/pycharm-guide/public to sites/pycharm/guide

The content is proxied at, for example, https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/guide/.

Troubleshooting Gatsby

When things go wrong with Gatsby, there are some things to try...

Docker-based approach

Using the Docker approach? Whatever you do, re-run the build configuration and re-create the Docker container. This will solve most, if not all, Gatsby cache issues.

Local approach

Running locally? You will need some background knowledge...

When you run yarn run pc:develop and edit, Gatsby does an incremental rebuild and reloads your browser. It's all very fast and very productive.

Except when it isn't. Due to a bug in how things are marked as outdated, you will sometimes find either an error in a GraphQL query, or something doesn't change on the screen. This is usually caused by the Gatsby cache in the .cache directory, either when authoring or when making a production build.

To address this:

• Shut down the process you are using to run Gatsby (yarn run ...)
• Run yarn run pc:clean (where pc is the Guide you want to clean)
• Re-start your Guide (yarn run ...)

License

The content of this repository are under two licenses. The software is covered by the Apache 2 license and the content is covered by the Creative Common license. See the LICENSE.txt file for the detail.

When non-JetBrains contributor join, they needed to acknowledge consent by adding a comment on the ticket in the repository.