Thanks for your interest in contributing to Ionic's documentation! 🎉 Check the guidelines below for suggestions and requirements before submitting your contribution.
In order to run the documentation locally, install the dependencies and run the development server:
$ npm install
$ npm start
Note: recent versions of npm (5+) and Node.js (10+) are required to run certain scripts.
The Ionic docs were originally built in a Mac-based environment, so Mac-focused linting rules apply when committing changes. To contribute on Windows, do the following:
- Configure VS Code to read/save files using line breaks (LF) instead of carriage returns (CRLF). Set it globally by navigating to: Settings -> Text Editor -> Files -> Eol. Set to
\n
. - Check that the Git setting
core.autocrlf
is set tofalse
: rungit config -l | grep autocrlf
. Switch it to false using:git config --global core.autocrlf false
. - If you've already cloned the
ionic-docs
repo, the files may already be cached as LF. To undo this, you need to clean the cache files of the repository. Run the following (make sure you stage or commit your changes first):git rm --cached -r .
thengit reset --hard
.
Ionic's documentation is built using Stencil. The content is written as Markdown or pulled in as JSON data from other Ionic repositories.
At a high level, the production documentation works like this:
- At build time, the
build-pages
script reads the Markdown insrc/pages/
and creates a JSON representation of each page at the same pathpages/ ├── index.json └── index.md
- At runtime, the
docs-page
component receives the current path (e.g./docs
) - The
docs-page
component fetches and parses the JSON representation of that page - The
docs-page
component renders that data using a template
Note: most reference content (e.g. APIs, native plugins, CLI commands) is not stored as Markdown. Those pages are created using data provided by other repositories to the
build-pages
script.
scripts/
- build scripts used to generate JSON representations of each page and other data used in the docssrc/
- source code and content of the docsassets/
- static assets used on the site, like images and fontscomponents/
- Stencil components used in the documentation UIdemos/
- Self-contained demos, optionally presented by pages viademoUrl
YAML frontmatterpages/
- Markdown content organized by route and uncommitted JSON representation of each pagestyles/
- Global and page-specific styles (non-component styles)
The docs-page
component is responsible for loading and rendering page content. Page content is rendered using one of the templates exported here. Pages can specify a template via the template
key in their frontmatter, or the default template will be used.
const Template = templates[page.template] || template.default;
return <Template page={page} />;
The docs-menu
component is responsible for rendering the side menu. The menu content differs by path and is specified in per-section templates.
The content of the Ionic docs is written as Markdown in src/pages
. Each Markdown file corresponds to a route.
/docs/ => src/pages/index.md
/docs/intro/cli => src/pages/intro/cli.md
/docs/theming/advanced => src/pages/theming/advanced.md
/docs/theming => src/pages/theming.md
You can make copy edits to the site by editing the Markdown files directly on GitHub. In your pull request, please explain what was missing from or inaccurate about the content.
To edit or create content locally, you'll need to run the development server. By default, the pages are only built once while starting the server. You can rebuild the pages continuously as you edit them by concurrently running the watch-pages
script:
$ npm run watch-pages
Note: the
watch-pages
script won't reload the page. You will need to reload the page manually after your page is rebuilt.
The Markdown in src/pages
does not contain all of the Ionic documentation's content:
- Paths matching
/docs/api/*
are built from the Ionic Framework source code - Paths matching
/docs/native/*
are built from the Ionic Native source code - Paths matching
/docs/cli/commands/*
are built from the Ionic CLI source code
To add or update an Ionic Native community plugin:
- Open a pull request on the Ionic Native repository (both code or documentation).
- Once the change has been approved and merged into master by the Ionic team, do the following steps:
# Clone Ionic Native repo
git clone [email protected]:ionic-team/ionic-native.git
cd ionic-native
# Build the Ionic Native project
npm run build
# Run scripts to generate the plugin JSON file
npm ci
npm run docs-json
# Overwrite the ionic-docs native.json file with the new changes
mv scripts/docs-json/plugins.json /path/to/docs/scripts/data/native.json
- Open a PR in the
ionic-docs
repo, submitting the newnative.json
file.
The Ionic docs have been translated into Japanese and are in the process of being translated into Chinese, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. We've chosen these languages because we believe they have the greatest number of developers where English-only documentation would be a barrier.
We use Crowdin for our translation service. You can participate in the translation effort on the Ionic Crowdin page.
Please submit translation issues to the Crowdin page and not the Ionic Docs GitHub repo
The Japanese translation of the docs were built by an independent team, lead by rdlabo and can be found and contributed to on the ionic-jp group's ionic-docs
project page.
When adding new pages to the docs, add a new token representing the page name to the appropriate Menu template (src/components/menu/templates
).
For example, in src/components/menu/templates/main.tsx
:
// 'token': 'path'
'menu-intro-cli': '/docs/intro/cli',
Then, add the token and its translation to each file within the src/assets/locales
folder:
For example, in src/assets/locales/en/messages.json
:
// 'token': 'translated text'
"menu-intro-cli": "CLI Installation",
Before submitting an issue to the Ionic docs repo, please search existing issues to avoid duplicate reports.
If the issue you're reporting is a bug, please be sure it is an issue with the Ionic docs themselves and not the subject of the documentation. With your report, please provide:
- Steps to reproduce
- Expected behavior
- OS and browser versions
- If possible, a demo repo or CodePen/CodeSandbox
Note: Some reference content is pulled from other Ionic repos. In that case, please submit your issue on the docs repo with a link to the repo where the content lives.
When submitting pull requests, please keep the scope of your change contained to a single feature or bug. When in doubt, err on the side of smaller pull requests. If your pull request is a new feature, we would recommend opening an issue first to come to an agreement about the feature before putting in significant time.
Note:
tslint
will run automatically when you attempt to commit. Our lint rules extend tslint-ionic-rules.
Internally, the Ionic documentation team uses a project board to plan work on the docs. The lanes on the board are:
- Backlog 🗄️ - Issues we plan to address, generally sorted by urgency
- On Deck ⚾ - Issues to be addressed during the current sprint, pulled from backlog during sprint planning
- In Progress 🔨 - Assigned issues that are currently being addressed
- Needs Review 🔍 - Pull requests and issues that have a pending review
- Done 🎉 - Issues that have been resolved
If you're looking for issues to help out with, we'd recommend either asking about an issue in the backlog or checking for issues labeled help-wanted
.
The Ionic documentation's master
branch is deployed automatically and separately from the Ionic site itself. The Ionic site then uses a proxy for paths under /docs
to request the deployed documentation.
This repo is licensed and managed separately from Ionic itself.
By contributing to this repo, you agree to have your contributions licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE for the full license text.