Bede Documentation

This is a collection of useful pieces of documentation for Bede. User contributions are encouraged.

How to Contribute

To contribute to this documentation, first create a fork of the repository on GitHub and clone it to your local machine, see Fork a Repo for the GitHub documentation on this process.

Once you have cloned your fork, you will need to install the dependencies to be able to build the documentation. See the instructions below for how to achieve this.

Once you have made your changes, commited them and pushed them to your fork on GitHub you will need to Open a Pull Request. All changes to the repository should be made through Pull Requests, including those made by the people with direct push access. Using feature branches is recommended.

Installing Dependencies

This documentation requires python >= 3.9 and a number of python packages as listed in requirements.txt. This would be typically done using a Python Virtual Environment, or conda

Using a python venv

mkdir -m 700 -p ~/.venvs
python3 -m venv ~/.venvs/bede
source ~/.venvs/bede/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Using conda (windows)

From a conda-enabled terminal:

conda create --name bede python=3.9
conda activate bede
pip install -r requirements.txt

Building the documentation

To build the HTML documentation run the following from a shell with the bede environment enabled:

make html

Or if you don't have the make utility installed on your machine then build with sphinx directly:

sphinx-build -W . ./html

Continuous build and serve

The package sphinx-autobuild provides a watcher that automatically rebuilds the site as files are modified.

To start the autobuild process, from a shell with the bede environment enabled run:

make livehtml

Or if you don't have the make utility installed on your machine then build with sphinx-autobuild directly:

sphinx-autobuild . ./html

The application also serves up the site at port 8000 by default at http://localhost:8000.

Testing Read the Docs extensions

When hosted on Read the Docs, additional Javascript is injected into the page(s) to add the version selector and ethical adverts.

To test this locally, define the environment variable MOCK_RTD locally and build the documentation. You may need to serve the content over a webserver to avoid CORS errors (i.e. use livehtml).

MOCK_RTD="True" make clean livehtml

Making Changes to the Documentation

The documentation consists of a series of reStructured Text files which have the .rst extension. These files are then automatically converted to HTML and combined into the web version of the documentation by sphinx. It is important that when editing the files the syntax of the rst files is followed.

If there are any errors in your changes the build will fail and the documentation will not update, you can test your build locally by running make html. The easiest way to learn what files should look like is to read the rst files already in the repository.

The docs use the Sphinx Book Theme with customisations to match the N8 brand guidelines.

Accessibility Testing via pa11y

To evaluate webpage accessibility, tools such as pa11y can be used to evaluate if accessibility guidelines are being met.

After installing pa11y-ci, and building the documentation locally it can be used to parse individual html files, or lists of html files. Sphinx generates some html files which will fail accessibility tests, which are non-trivial to fix manually, so ignoring certain files is worthwhile.

Checking all generted html files can take a number of minutes.

# Check the index page for accessibility issues
pa11y-ci ./_build/html/index.html

# Find and parse html files in _build/html excluding certain files which we cannot correct.
pa11y-ci $(find _build/html -name "*.html" -and -not -path "*webpack*" -and -not -name "genindex.html" -and -not -name "search.html")

# Produce Json output for subsequent parsing, i.e. to integrate into CI if desired.
pa11y-ci --json $(find _build/html -name "*.html" -and -not -path "*webpack*" -and -not -name "genindex.html" -and -not -name "search.html") > pa11y-ci-report.json