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Building the Documentation Yourself

For Documentation Contributors Only

This is for people who want to update the documentation of chiaki4deck and see the updates locally or if you are a regular user and are curious on how to do it. In most cases, just accessing the documentation via the site https://streetpea.github.io/chiaki4deck/ is best. If you want to access the documentation without internet access, instead of following this documentation, you should navigate to the print page (which displays the documentation in printable format). Then, Print->Save to pdf in your web browser and access the PDF freely offline.

Installing Necessary Pre-requisites

  1. Install pip3 on your computer, if it's not already installed (instructions vary depending on Operating System)

  2. Install mkdocs and plugins used in chiaki4deck documentation

    pip3 install mkdocs mkdocs-material mkdocs-git-revision-date-localized-plugin mkdocs-print-site-plugin

  3. Get a local copy of the source code with:

    git clone https://github.com/streetpea/chiaki4deck.git

    git clone git@github.com:streetpea/chiaki4deck.git 

    gh repo clone streetpea/chiaki4deck

  4. Change into the source code directory in your terminal

  5. Serve the documentation in a terminal while in your source code directory with:

    mkdocs serve

  6. Open a web browser and access the documentation

    The above mkdocs serve command should output an address to access the documentation which by default is: http://127.0.0.1:8000 which is over localhost (only accessible locally). Go to this address to access the documentation.

    Documentation updates automatically

    If you leave the terminal tab where you ran mkdocs serve open, the docs will update automatically when your save your changes to the file. This way as you make changes you can check your changes at the given web site, displaying in the same way as it will when displayed as a static website on GitHub.

  7. Make edits to the relevant markdown files in the docs/ subfolder, and watch the changes display in realtime in your web browser when you save your file updates.

Special Documentation Features

To use the special features of mkdocs-material and the plugins used in these docs that enhance the documentation from traditional markdown, please take a look at the syntax for the various features. You can find examples of them in action in the markdown of this site by either:

  • Inspecting a given page of the site in your web browser

    1. scroll to the top of a page with a feature you want to see how to use
    2. click the page with an eye icon to the right of the title
    3. Inspect the markdown for the part of the page with the given feature

OR

  • See the markdown for the entire site in the docs/ subfolder of the GitHub project, navigating the markdown files for each page

Additionally, you can find more examples and explainers on the mkdocs-material reference page.

Last update: January 5, 2023
Created: January 5, 2023