Publish a Techdocs Site

Preface

This how-to will take you through the steps of building and publishing a techdocs site for inclusion in the developer portal catalog. In order to do this we must build the site and push it to a S3 compatible object store.

Setup & Configure Mkdocs

To begin, follow the getting started guide for Mkdocs. You should include techdocs-core in plugins list and subsequently mkdocs-techdocs-core in your python requirements definition.

Warning

Beware, techdocs-core overrides various mkdocs configuration options including theme.

Example

site_name: Developer Portal
site_url: https://0.0.0.0/
repo_url: https://github.com/DiamondLightSource/developer-portal
edit_uri: edit/main/docs/
plugins:
  - techdocs-core

Build Docs

We will use the Techdocs command line interface node package to build our docs site locally. To do this we will run:

npx @techdocs/cli generate --no-docker

At this point you should see a site directory, the contents of which can be viewed in your browser.

Publish Docs

We will use the Techdocs command line interface node package to publish our docs site to the S3 bucket.

In order to do this we will require the necessary credentials for the bucket. The necessary credentials should be made available as the environment variables AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY. These credentials are made available in GitHub Workflows in the DiamondLightSource organisation as TECHDOCS_S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID and TECHDOCS_S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY respectively or can be attained by contacting the owner of developer-portal-techdocs-bucket. Further to this, the AWS_REGION environment variable should be set to a valid region code, e.g. eu-west-2.

We will now run:

npx @techdocs/cli publish --entity <NAMESPACE/KIND/NAME> --publisher-type awsS3 --storage-name techdocs --awsEndpoint https://s3.echo.stfc.ac.uk --awsS3ForcePathStyle

Example GitHub Workflow

name: Docs CI

on:
  push:
    - main

jobs:
  publish_techdocs:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v3
      with:
      fetch-depth: 0

    - name: Setup python
      uses: actions/setup-python@v4
      with:
      python-version: 3.11

    - name: Install docs dependencies
      run: pip install -r docs-requirements.txt

    - name: Set node
      uses: actions/setup-node@v4.2.0
      with:
      node-version: 20.x

    - name: Generate docs
      run: npx @techdocs/cli generate --no-docker

    - name: Publish docs to s3 bucket
      run: >
        npx @techdocs/cli publish
        --entity default/component/developer-portal-backend
        --publisher-type awsS3
        --storage-name techdocs
        --awsEndpoint https://s3.echo.stfc.ac.uk
        --awsS3ForcePathStyle
      env:
        AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: ${{ secrets.TECHDOCS_S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
        AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: ${{ secrets.TECHDOCS_S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
        AWS_REGION: "eu-west-2"

Example GitLab Workflow

image: node:20-bullseye

variables:
  GIT_SUBMODULE_STRATEGY: recursive

stages:
  - publish_techdocs

before_script:
  - apt-get update
  - apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends python3-pip
  - pip install -r requirements.txt

publish_techdocs:
  stage: publish_techdocs
  rules:
    - if: $CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME == "main"
  tags:
    - argus
  script:
    - npx @techdocs/cli generate --no-docker
    - >
      npx @techdocs/cli publish
      --entity default/component/developer-guide
      --publisher-type awsS3
      --storage-name techdocs
      --awsEndpoint https://s3.echo.stfc.ac.uk
      --awsS3ForcePathStyle
  variables:
    AWS_REGION: "eu-west-2"

Annotate Entity

Finally, we will add the backstage.io/techdocs-ref annotation to the metadata.annotations field of the entity descriptor. This should point to the root directory of the documentation (i.e. the directory containing the mkdocs.yaml file).

Example Entity Descriptor

apiVersion: backstage.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: developer-guide
  annotations:
    backstage.io/techdocs-ref: dir:.
spec:
  type: website
  lifecycle: experimental
  owner: user:enu43627