New Bonita Documentation Site

This repository lets you generate the Bonita documentation site. It uses Antora which processes AsciiDoc documentation content stored in various Git repositories.

Documentation

See the dedicated folder for

• documentation content contribution tips/guidelines

• architecture

• maintainers guides

• and much more

More details are available in the Architecture Documentation.

Build

Requirements

Node 16.x (may work with newer versions, no guarantee).

While you can install Node from the official packages, we strongly recommend that you use nvm (Node Version Manager) to install and manage Node. Follow the nvm installation instructions to set up nvm on your machine. Then run nvm use.

ℹ️	all commands are intended to be run from the repository root folder. the generated documentation is available in the build/site folder.

Don’t forget to run npm install the first time you build the project or on package.json changes.

Check that the Antora CLI is available by calling npx antora --version.

Non production build

Preview support

The easiest way is to use a script that generates the documentation partially and/or with specific settings for both local developments, Pull Request previews or to produce documentation archives.

This includes building the documentation using:

• already checkout local documentation content repositories

• single branch for all components

• single branch of a single component

• a set of branches of various components. It lets validate references between pages that belong to different docs components and/or versions

• …​.

To know all available options, run

./build-preview.bash --help

ℹ️	An additional build-preview-dev.bash script is available: it calls build-preview.bash with convenient defaults for local build. In the following, we use both scripts indifferently.

Build a single component version using locally modified document content sources (see required setup)

./build-preview-dev.bash --local-sources \
  --component bonita \
  --branch fix/a_major_documentation_content_fix

Build BCD 3.4, Bonita 7.11 and Bonita 2021.1 versions (cross reference component versions check)

./build-preview-dev.bash \
  --use-multi-repositories \
  --component-with-branches bcd:3.4 \
  --component-with-branches bonita:7.11,2021.1

Preview support overview

The documentation is built by passing a playbook file to the Antora CLI. For more details, see Antora CLI documentation.

For the preview support, we generate a dedicated Antora playbook based on the production playbook store in the repository and options passed to the build-preview.bash.
Then, this custom playbook is passed to the Antora CLI along with specific options when needed.

Documentation content cache

By default, without passing any specific options to the CLI relating to the documentation content, the resources are only fetched once from the remote locations and then cached in the .cache directory.

⚠️	This cache is not updated except if you specify it to the CLI by passing the --fetch-sources option.

You may need to update the cache if you want to retrieve a fresher version of the content. For instance, to get new branches related to new documentation versions, or newer content of existing versions.

Resources put in the cache:

• documentation content git repository

• ui-bundles (Bonita and default themes)

• Antora Atlas site manifest (use to validate references)

For more details, see:

• Configure Antora’s Cache

• Antora Atlas configuration

Using local documentation content repositories

This activates the Antora author mode.
Antora uses the locally cloned repositories as they are on your local machine instead of cloning them from their remote location.

This provides a fast feedback loop as you don’t need to push nor commit sources content. This also makes developments easier when working offline.

ℹ️

Repositories location This requires to clone content sources repositories locally is the parent folder of this project. Depending on which sources you use (see the options of the bash script), you may have to clone all, or a part of the repositories used by the Bonita documentation. For instance: root | -- bonita-central-doc | -- bonita-cloud-doc | -- bonita-continuous-delivery-doc | -- bonita-doc | -- bonita-documentation-site | -- bonita-labs-doc

This can be achieved by running

./build-preview-dev.bash --local-sources ....

Using test documentation content

To play with settings, validate the UI Bundle, experiment AsciiDoc syntax and much more, the bonita-documentation-site repository provides a test site structure with documentation content.

The generation site generation is very fast, so using this content reduces the feedback loop.

This can be achieved by running

./build-preview-dev.bash --use-test-sources ....

Using local UI Bundle

The prebuilt UI Bundle is stored in this repository and sources are located in the bonita-documentation theme repository.
If you are developing in the theme repository and want to see the resulting changes in the documentation, you can directly use the UI Bundle built by the theme repository.
This provides a fast feedback loop as you don’t need to build copy the UI bundle from the theme repository and then run a build command: everything can be done by running a single command once the push nor commit content as the current work.

Remember that the theme repository provides a preview with mock content that make development easier. But sometimes, integration tests are required to ensure everything is ok, especially when dealing with site keys.

ℹ️	Repositories location This requires to clone the theme repository locally is the parent folder of this project. For instance root | -- bonita-documentation-theme | -- bonita-documentation-site

This can be achieved by running

./build-preview-dev.bash --local-ui-bundle ...

For a faster loop, don’t forget you can build the UI Bundle and the preview by chaining the commands

<ui_bundle_build_command> ; ./build-preview-dev.bash --local-ui-bundle ...

Using the Default Antora UI

Sometimes, you need to compare the site rendering with this bundle if you suspect a bug in the Bonita documentation theme.

This can be achieved by running

./build-preview-dev.bash --default-ui-bundle ...

If you want to ensure you use the latest version of the bundle pass --default-ui-bundle snapshot. Otherwise, a cache version is used. For more details, see the Antora Documentation

Quick fix and experiment Antora UI changes directly in the documentation site

If you need/want to experiment changes without rebuilding the theme, especially if the changes only involve the template, you can directly put the files in the documentation site.

See the Antora supplemental UI for a complete explanation.

For articles explaining use cases using supplemental files, see

• http://www.northwestopendata.org.uk/nwod/blog/convert_blog.html

• https://lightbend.github.io/antora-supplemental-ui-lightbend-theme/build/site/index.html

Reference validation and partial build

Reference validation, which covers xrefs, includes, and images, is performed automatically when Antora runs.

The validation errors are shown in the log output, and the build of the Bonita documentation site is configured to enforce reference validation.

Each message shows the repository source, the refname, and the path from the root of that repository.

[14:29:22.246] ERROR (asciidoctor): target of xref not found: :do-not-exist_for_sure.adoc
file: modules/ROOT/pages/index.adoc:7
source: https://github.com/bonitasoft/bonita-doc.git (branch: ci/simplify_xref_validation)
[14:29:22.247] ERROR (asciidoctor): target of xref not found: 3.6@bcd::do-not-exist_for_sure-in-bcd.adoc
file: modules/ROOT/pages/index.adoc:9
source: https://github.com/bonitasoft/bonita-doc.git (branch: ci/simplify_xref_validation)

Reminder: What is a xref?

For more details, see the Antora xref documentation:

An AsciiDoc xref macro is used to create a source-to-source cross reference from a resource to a publishable resource. The term cross reference, which is often abbreviated to xref, means to use the AsciiDoc xref macro to reference the source file of a publishable resource

For more details about using xref in the documentation content, see the contributing guide.

Partial build and reference validation

When doing a partial build (i.e. not building the whole site), some cross-references between component versions may fail as the target resources are not available.

The Antora Atlas extension provides a way to work around this issue by making the references available while validating.

This is done using a site manifest, in two steps:

• export the site manifest. The export is always enabled and the file is published in production at the same place as the rest of the site content

• import the site manifest. It is enabled automatically when partially building the site with the ./build-preview.bash script. The site manifest file is downloaded from the production site

Special local configuration to use the "import" feature

The Antora Atlas extension is currently in alpha, and it requires an alpha version of Antora (3.2 line) to work.

However, we use a stable 3.1 Antora version to build the site. We don’t want to rely on an alpha version that is more rarely updated and not always includes all bug fixes.
So, a special configuration must be put in place to make the Atlas extension work to manage the xref validation.

Reference validation is done in a specific GitHub workflow when validating PR in documentation content repositories. It calls a dedicated action that handles the special configuration.

To locally use the Atlas extension for reference validation, do the same as in .github/actions/build-pr-site/action.yml to install the latest alpha Antora version.

⚠️	be aware of the cache. Once in cache, the site manifest file is put in cache and is never downloaded again.

http dev server

ℹ️	Most of the time, pages can be browsed locally without requiring a http dev server. You may need it to test specific features like displaying Asciinema resources or testing redirects. See below for more details.

Once the static site is build, you can run npm run serve and access it with http://localhost:8080 to check if everything is working correctly (urls in taxonomy, links, …​.).

You can rebuild the site while the server is running, updated files are directly considered by the server (no cache).

To ensure all links are correctly generated for local deployment, pass the --site-url http://localhost:8080 options when building the preview.

💡	A http server is needed to correctly see the Asciinema resources (loading fail when using a local file browsing). For instance, have a look at http://localhost:8080/bonita/2021.1/migrate-from-an-earlier-version-of-bonita-bpm#update-case-overview-pages

💡	The http dev server is provided by the Netlify CLI, so it is able to replicate a lot of the Netlify Edge features. In particular, it is able to apply the same redirects as those used in production. See for configure Netlify redirects how-to more details.

Shared CI resources

This repository contains shared resources used by the GitHub Actions workflows of the "documentation content" repositories.

Be aware that they are used by referencing the master branch of this repository, so any changes pushed to the master branch impact all "documentation content" repositories. So double check prior changing the reusable workflows and shared actions!

Shared resources are:

• shared actions

• reusable workflows: by convention, the reusable workflows are prefixed with reusable

Production build

⚠️	This is probably something you won’t often do as the site is not fully working for local browsing nor for simple http server.

🔥	The following command fetch the documentation content repositories each time it runs. See Non production build for alternatives.

Run npm run build