Valkey documentation

This repo contains the Valkey documentation in Markdown format, which is used for generating content for the website and man pages.

Installing man pages

This repo comes with a Makefile to build and install man pages.

make VALKEY_ROOT=path/to/valkey
sudo make install INSTALL_MAN_DIR=/usr/local/share/man

Prerequisites: GNU Make, Python 3, Python 3 YAML (pyyaml), Pandoc. Additionally, the scripts need access to the valkey code repo, where metadata files about the commands are stored.

The pages are generated under _build/man/ by default. The default install location is /usr/local/share/man (in the appropriate subdirectories).

To uninstall the man pages, run as root make uninstall INSTALL_MAN_DIR=/usr/local/share/man.

It's also possible to build local HTML files for local usage, using make html. These HTML files are generated under _build/html/ by default. The starting point of the documentation is topics/index.html.

Writing docs

The content of this doc repo is backing the documentation on the website, man pages and potentially other formats. Links between pages are relative and point directly to the .md files as they are stored in this repo. Don't start links with /. This makes sure the links point to existing files regardless of where in the file system the docs are located, which makes it easier to find broken links. In text editors and in the GitHub user inteface, it's possible to click on the links to open the corresponding Markdown page.

Examples: ../commands/get.md or replication.md.

A few exceptions are links to the topics/, commands/, clients/ and modules/ directories, which end with a slash. These pages are generated (with the exception of topics/ which is in topics/index.md).

Examples: ../commands/#sorted-set, ../topics/, ./.

Topics

The files under topics/ are generic documentation pages. The index.md page is a starting point.

In the top of these files, there's a frontmatter metadata section, between two lines of three dashes (---). These are YAML fields of which we use only the title field (and possibly linkTitle). The title field is used instead of an H1 heading in each of the pages.

Clients, modules, libraries, tools

We maintain links to clients, modules, libraries and tools in various langauges in JSON files stored under clients/, modules/, libraries/ and tools/ respectively.

Note: Clients listed here, while fully compatible with Valkey, are not all official clients for Valkey. They are maintained by their original developers.

All clients are listed under language specific sub-folders of clients

The path follows the pattern: clients/{language}/github.com/{owner}/{repository}.json. The {language} component of the path is the path-safe representation of the full language name which is mapped in languages.json.

Each client's JSON object represents the details displayed on the clients documentation page.

For example clients/python/github.com/valkey-io/valkey-go.json:

{
    "name": "valkey-go",
    "description": "A fast Golang Valkey client that supports Client Side Caching and Auto Pipelining.",
    "recommended": true
}

Modules, libraries and tools follow a similar structure under their respective directories.

Commands

The command pages under commands/ in this repo are not complete without some metadata from the Valkey repo, namely the JSON files in the src/commands/ folder. The content of these JSON files is combined with the Markdown files in this repo when the documentation is rendered.

See: https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/tree/unstable/src/commands/

For each command there's a Markdown file with a complete, human-readable description. We process these files to provide a better experience.

• Inside text, all commands should be written in all caps, in between backticks. For example: INCR.

The reply types and descriptions are stored in separate JSON files in this doc repo. Each command will have a description and both RESP2 and RESP3 return values. When adding or editing return values, be sure to edit both files. Use the following links for the reply type. Regarding the return values, these are contained in the files:

• resp2_replies.json
• resp3_replies.json

Each file is a dictionary with a matching set of keys. Each key is an array of strings that, when processed, produce Markdown content. Here's an example:

{
  ...
  "ACL CAT": [
    "One of the following:",
    "* [Array reply](topics/protocol.md#arrays): an array of [Bulk string reply](topics/protocol.md#bulk-strings) elements representing ACL categories or commands in a given category.",
    "* [Simple error reply](topics/protocol.md#simple-errors): the command returns an error if an invalid category name is given."
  ],
  ...
}

Styling guidelines

Please use the following formatting rules (aiming for smaller diffs that are easier to review):

• Please avoid writing lines that are too long. That makes the diff harder to review when only one word is changed.
• Single linebreaks are not significant in Markdown, so when editing an existing sentence or paragraph, don't change the existing linebreaks. That just makes reviewing harder.
• Start every sentence on a new line.

Checking your work

After making changes to the documentation, you can use the spellchecker-cli package to validate your spelling as well as some minor grammatical errors. You can install the spellchecker locally by running:

npm install --global spellchecker-cli

You can than validate your spelling by running the following

spellchecker --no-suggestions -f '**/*.md' -l en-US -q -d wordlist

Any exceptions you need for spelling can be added to the wordlist file.