zulip/docs/documentation/overview.md

Documentation systems

Zulip has three major documentation systems:

• Developer and sysadmin documentation: Documentation for people actually interacting with the Zulip codebase (either by developing it or installing it), and written in Markdown.

• Core website documentation: Complete webpages for complex topics, written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS (using the Django templating system). These roughly correspond to the documentation someone might look at when deciding whether to use Zulip. We don't expect to ever have more than about 10 pages written using this system.

• User-facing documentation: Our scalable system for documenting Zulip's huge collection of specific features without a lot of overhead or duplicated code/syntax, written in Markdown. We have several hundred pages written using this system. There are 3 branches of this documentation:

  • Help center documentation (with a target audience of individual Zulip users)
  • Integrations documentation (with a target audience of IT folks setting up integrations)
  • API documentation (with a target audience of developers writing code to extend Zulip)

These three systems are documented in detail.

Developer and sysadmin documentation

What you are reading right now is part of the collection of documentation targeted at developers and people running their own Zulip servers. These docs are written in CommonMark Markdown with a small bit of rST. We've chosen Markdown because it is easy to write. The source for Zulip's developer documentation is at docs/ in the Zulip Git repository, and they are served in production at zulip.readthedocs.io.

This documentation is hosted by the excellent ReadTheDocs service. ReadTheDocs automatically builds a preview for every pull request, accessible from a "Details" link in the "Checks" section of the pull request page. It's nonetheless valuable to submit a screenshot with any pull request modifying documentation to help make reviews efficient.

If you want to build the developer documentation locally (e.g. to test your changes), the dependencies are automatically installed as part of Zulip development environment provisioning, and you can build the documentation using:

./tools/build-docs

and then opening http://127.0.0.1:9991/docs/index.html in your browser. The raw files are available at file:///path/to/zulip/docs/_build/html/index.html in your browser (so you can also use e.g. firefox docs/_build/html/index.html from the root of your Zulip checkout).

If you are adding a new page to the table of contents, you will want to modify docs/index.rst and run make clean before make html, so that other docs besides your new one also get the new entry in the table of contents.

You can also usually test your changes by pushing a branch to GitHub and looking at the content on the GitHub web UI, since GitHub renders Markdown, though that won't be as faithful as the make html approach or the preview build.

When editing dependencies for the Zulip documentation, you should edit requirements/docs.in and then run tools/update-locked-requirements which updates docs.txt file (which is used by ReadTheDocs to build the Zulip developer documentation, without installing all of Zulip's dependencies).

Core website documentation

Zulip has around 10 HTML documentation pages under templates/zerver for specific major topics, like the features list, client apps, integrations, hotkeys, API bindings, etc. These documents often have somewhat complex HTML and JavaScript, without a great deal of common patterns between them other than inheriting from the portico.html template. We generally avoid adding new pages to this collection unless there's a good reason, but we don't intend to migrate them, either, since this system gives us the flexibility to express these important elements of the product clearly.

User-facing documentation

All of these systems use a common Markdown-based framework with various extensions for macros and variable interpolation, (render_markdown_path in the code), designed to make it convenient to do the things one does a lot in each type of documentation.

Help center documentation

Zulip's help center documentation is designed to explain how the product works to end users. We aim for this to be clear, concise, correct, and readable to nontechnical audiences where possible.

See our guide on writing help center articles.

Integrations documentation

Zulip's integrations documentation is user-facing documentation explaining to end users how to set up each of Zulip's more than 100 integrations. There is a detailed guide on documenting integrations, including style guidelines to ensure that the documentation is high quality and consistent.

See also our broader integrations developer guide.

API documentation

Zulip's API documentation is intended to make it easy for a technical user to write automation tools that interact with Zulip. This documentation also serves as our main mechanism for Zulip server developers to communicate with client developers about how the Zulip API works.

See the API documentation tutorial for details on how to contribute to this documentation.

Automated testing

Zulip has several automated test suites that we run in CI and recommend running locally when making significant edits:

• tools/lint catches a number of common mistakes, and we highly recommend using our linter pre-commit hook. See the main linter doc for more details.

• The ReadTheDocs docs are built and the links tested by tools/test-documentation, which runs build-docs and then checks all the links.

There's an exclude list for the link testing at this horrible path: tools/documentation_crawler/documentation_crawler/spiders/common/spiders.py, which is relevant for flaky links.

• The API docs are tested by tools/test-api, which does some basic payload verification. Note that this test does not check for broken links (those are checked by test-help-documentation).

• tools/test-help-documentation checks /help/, /api/, /integrations/, and the core website ("portico") documentation for broken links. Note that the "portico" documentation check has a manually maintained whitelist of pages, so if you add a new page to this site, you will need to edit PorticoDocumentationSpider to add it.

• tools/test-backend test_docs.py tests various internal details of the variable substitution logic, as well as rendering. It's essential when editing the documentation framework, but not something you'll usually need to interact with when editing documentation.