Create & edit documents

Check out a repository

Documents are grouped into repositories, which represent the unit of deployment. Each document repository is tracked as a Mercurial repository. A repository can be checked out with (substitute USER with your username, and REPO with the name of the repository):

hg checkout https://USER@c-space.net/rc/hg/t-doc/REPO

The typical structure of a document repository is shown below. The source files are located below the docs directory.

├── .github
│   └── workflows
│       └── publish.yml       A workflow to publish the repository
├── docs
│   ├── conf.py               The Sphinx configuration
│   ├── index.md              The main index page
│   └── ...                   The source documents
├── .gitignore
├── .hgignore
├── LICENSE.txt
├── README.md
├── run.desktop               A desktop entry to run the local server on Linux
└── run.py                    An auto-installing wrapper for the tdoc command

Edit documents

• Run the local server.

  Windows

  Double-click the file run.py in the repository root. Make sure that .py files are associated with Python by default.

  Alternatively, open a terminal, change to the repository root, and run:

  run.py serve
  

  macOS

  Open a terminal, change to the repository root, and run:

  ./run.py serve
  

  Linux

  Double-click the file run.desktop in the repository root.

  Alternatively, open a terminal, change to the repository root, and run:

  ./run.py serve
  

  The server renders the source files into HTML, and serves the site over HTTP.

  Running Sphinx
  loading translations [fr]... done
  making output directory... done
  (...)
  build succeeded.
  
  The HTML pages are in _build\serve-1724331687766143000\html.
  Serving at <http://[::1]:8000/>
  

• Navigate to http://localhost:8000/ to view the generated pages.

• Create and edit documents in the docs directory. This can be done with any plain text editor.

  • The local server watches the source files and automatically rebulids the HTML when a file changes.

  • When the build is successful, the browser automatically reloads all open pages.

  • If a build fails, the errors can be viewed in the terminal.

• Stop the local server by clicking the  button in the header, by typing Ctrl+C in the terminal, or by closing the terminal window.

• Don't forget to commit changes frequently.

Deploy documents

To deploy the repository to tdoc.org, make sure that all changes have been committed (and that new files have been added with Mercurial), then push the changes to the server.

hg push

The changes should be live at https://t-doc.org/REPO within a few minutes. If the build fails, GitHub will send you an email notification. It contains a link to the build log, which should allow figuring out what went wrong.