Editing Documentation

The documentation that you are reading now is an invaluable resource for newcomers and experienced users alike. Contributions to the documentation are very welcome.

We currently use the MkDocs as our static site generator and ReadTheDocs as our web host.

To edit the documentation, first clone the repository locally, then install HELM from the repository by following the Developer Setup instructions. After that, install the MkDocs dependencies by running the following from the root of the repository:

pip install -r docs/requirements.txt

You should now be able to run MkDocs from the root of the repository:

mkdocs serve

Then navigate to http://localhost:8000/ to view your locally-built documentation.

The source Markdown files for the documentation are stored in the docs/ folder. By default, MkDocs watches the source directories for changes and automatically re-renders the web pages when it detects changes.

If you are creating a new page, you should add your page to the nav section in mkdocs.yml. This will add your page to the table of contents in the side menu.

We make heavy use of plugins and macros for auto-generating documentation from code and docstrings. For more information, please refer to the documentation for these plugins e.g. mkdocs-macros, mkdocstrings and mkdocstrings-python.