Documentation

This section describes how to modify the related documentation around bpfman. All bpfman's documentation is written in Markdown, and leverages mkdocs to generate a static site, which is hosted on netlify.

If this is the first time building using mkdocs, jump to the Development Environment Setup section for help installing the tooling.

Documentation Notes

This section describes some notes on the dos and don'ts when writing documentation.

Website Management

The headings and layout of the website, as well as other configuration settings, are managed from the mkdocs.yml file in the project root directory.

Markdown Style

When writing documentation via a Markdown file, the following format has been followed:

• Text on a given line should not exceed 100 characters, unless it's example syntax or a link that should be broken up.
• Each new sentence should start on a new line. That way, if text needs to be inserted, whole paragraphs don't need to be adjusted.
• Links to other markdown files are relative to the file the link is placed in.

Governance Files

There are a set of well known governance files that are typically placed in the root directory of most projects, like README.md, MAINTAINERS.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, etc. mkdocs expects all files used in the static website to be located under a common directory, docs/ for bpfman. To reference the governance files from the static website, a directory (docs/governance/) was created with a file for each governance file, the only contains --8<-- and the file name. This indicates to mkdocs to pull the additional file from the project root directory.

For example: docs/governance/MEETINGS.md

NOTE: This works for the website generation, but if a Markdown file is viewed through Github (not the website), the link is broken. So these files should only be linked from docs/index.md and mkdocs.yml.

docs/developer-guide/api-spec.md

The file docs/developer-guide/api-spec.md documents the CRDs used in a Kubernetes deployment. The contents are auto-generated when PRs are pushed to Github.

The contents can be generated locally by running the command ./scripts/api-docs/generate.sh apidocs.html from the root bpfman directory.

Generate Documentation

If you would like to test locally, build and preview the generated documentation, from the bpfman root directory, use mkdocs to build:

cd bpfman/
mkdocs build

NOTE: If mkdocs build gives you an error, make sure you have the mkdocs packages listed below installed.

To preview from a build on a local machine, start the mkdocs dev-server with the command below, then open up http://127.0.0.1:8000/ in your browser, and you'll see the default home page being displayed:

mkdocs serve

To preview from a build on a remote machine, start the mkdocs dev-server with the command below, then open up http://<ServerIP>:8000/ in your browser, and you'll see the default home page being displayed:

mkdocs serve -a 0.0.0.0:8000

Development Environment Setup

The recommended installation method is using pip.

pip install -r requirements.txt 

Once installed, ensure the mkdocs is in your PATH:

mkdocs -V
mkdocs, version 1.4.3 from /home/$USER/.local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/mkdocs (Python 3.11)

NOTE: If you have an older version of mkdocs installed, you may need to use the --upgrade option (e.g., pip install --upgrade mkdocs) to get it to work.

Document Images

Source of images used in the example documentation can be found in bpfman Upstream Images. Request access if required.