Pulumi Documentation Site

Contributing

Before adding new content, read CONTRIBUTING.md.

Toolchain

The website is statically built using Hugo. So we have basic templating for generating HTML and the ability to write most files in Markdown.

TypeScript documentation is generated directly from source using TYPEDOC. We just check the resulting files directly into the repo under ./content/reference/pkg/nodejs.

Development

Prerequisites

• Node.js and npm
• Ruby
• Yarn for installing dependencies in package.json
• Hugo
• Go
• DocFX

Hugo

The website is powered by Hugo.

IMPORTANT. Recent versions of Hugo have bugs in the markdown renderer (Blackfriday) that prevents fenced code from rendering correctly in lists when a language is specified. Many of our tutorials are made up of ordered lists of steps, each step containing a code snippet. Until those bugs are fixed, and Hugo has adopted the version of Blackfriday with the fixes, we'll pin to Hugo v0.55.4. Tracking issue: pulumi#1091

macOS

The following commands use the package manager, Homebrew.

Install Hugo

If you already have Hugo installed, uninstall it:

brew uninstall hugo

Install Hugo v0.55.4:

brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/cf3219506fd28f7133041b74761e8025418435a3/Formula/hugo.rb

To prevent brew from upgrading Hugo:

brew pin hugo

Install Go

brew install go

Linux (Ubuntu)

Install Hugo

The quickest way to install the extended version of Hugo v0.55.4 on your Linux machine is to use wget and the dpkg utility. For confirming your server architecture and post-installation cleanup, see Installing Hugo Using the dpkg utility.

wget https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v0.55.4/hugo_extended_0.55.4_Linux-64bit.deb

sudo dpkg -i hugo_extended_0.55.4_Linux-64bit.deb

If you wish to use brew on Linux, see Homebrew on Linux.

Install Go

Download the Linux package from https://golang.org/dl/. Follow installation and setup steps on "Installing Go on Ubuntu".

Go-based Tools

There are several other Go-based tools to install as well.

go get -u github.com/cbroglie/mustache
go get -u github.com/gobuffalo/packr
go get -u github.com/pkg/errors
go get -u gopkg.in/russross/blackfriday.v2

DocFX

DocFX is used to generate .NET API Reference docs. Install it with

brew install docfx

Makefile

make ensure will run yarn install which resolves project dependencies.

make lint_markdown will run yarn lint-markdown which lints the markdown in the content directory.

make build will generate the website (published to public).

make serve will build the website and serve it to http://localhost:1313.

make test runs a broken link checker tool against http://localhost:1313.

make generate will regenerate the TypeScript documentation if needed, as well as the CLI documentation in content/references/cli. The generated API documentation is placed in the [/content/reference/pkg/nodejs]/content/reference/pkg/nodejs) folder. This is extremely hacky.

The following repos must be peers of docs, should be checked out to an appropriate branch, and should be built before running make generate:

• pulumi
• pulumi-aws
• pulumi-azure
• pulumi-cloud
• pulumi-gcp
• pulumi-kubernetes
• etc.

Updating API docs

to update API docs for all Pulumi packages, run the following commands to fetch latest release of each package and rebuild docs into .content/reference/pkg folder:

./scripts/update_repos.sh
./scripts/run_typedoc.sh

To update a single package, make sure you have it checked out at the desired release label, and then run:

PKGS=yourpackagename ./scripts/run_typedoc.sh

Docs for additional packages can be added by updating ./scripts/run_typedoc.sh to include the package, and then updating ./config.toml to include the package in the TOC as a [[menu.reference]] entry.

Updating resource docs

Resource docs are only available for providers for which we can generate a Pulumi schema.

The primary script is ./scripts/gen_resource_docs.sh. The script takes the following arguments (in order):

• The provider package name, ex. aws.
• Whether to install the resource plugin (almost always should be true): true or false.
• The version of the provider so that the provider repo will be checked out at that version, as well as the resource plugin for that version will be installed.
  • The version must match a release tag exactly.

We currently have CI in-place to call the above script whenever a new provider version is released. See build-package-docs.sh in the pulumi/scripts repo.

If you are looking to generate resource docs for all providers, then you might find ./scripts/gen_all_resource_docs.sh useful. The only use-case for this script is if you need to regenerate docs for all supported providers out-of-band from CI on your local machine and then a PR for it.

Enlisting a new provider for docs

Generating docs for a new provider

Since Pulumi uses CI to generate docs, there isn't a need to keep scripts up-to-date when docs for a new provider need to be generated. Every provider repo uses similar Makefile that contains calls to the relevant scripts to generate docs for that provider when a new version is released.

However, there may be times when you need to generate docs for all providers out-of-band and submit a PR for it. To do that, ensure that the following files have all of the providers listed:

• For NodeJS API docs: scripts/run_typedoc.sh
• For Python API docs: scripts/generate_python_docs.sh and tools/pydocgen/pulumi-docs.json
• For .NET API docs: docfx/docfx.json
• For Resource docs: scripts/generate_all_resource_docs.sh

See each script for its usage, and the optional arguments they may accept.

Creating a new cloud providers intro page

Add a new folder under content/docs/intro/cloud-providers with instructions on how to use the provider.

Deploying updates

When changes are merged into master, https://www.pulumi.com/ is automatically deployed. You can use the Travis UI to check on the status of the deployment.

Design Reference

Web design is hard. Documentation is hard. Good web design for documentation is harder.

Examples of other sites and their docs as inspiration:

• https://kubernetes.github.io/
• https://devcenter.heroku.com/
• https://stripe.com/docs/api/curl#authentication
• http://developer.mailchimp.com/documentation/mailchimp/
• http://ionicframework.com/docs/
• https://www.twilio.com/docs/

Troubleshooting

If you're on macOS and you encounter an error running make serve about having too many open files, you’ll need to increase the number of file descriptors available to shell processes to some number greater than the number of files comprising the website, which is currently hovering at around 30K.

The commands below should help. The first sets the soft and hard limits for your system, and will persist until you restart your computer. The second is also required, and applies those limits for the duration of your shell.

sudo launchctl limit maxfiles 50000 50000
ulimit -n 50000

Once you do this, make serve should work for you.