Create & edit documents

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
├── serve.bat                 A script to run the local server on Windows
└── serve.desktop             A desktop entry to run the local server on Linux

Edit documents#

  • Run the local server.

    Double-click the file serve.bat in the repository directory.

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

    tdoc serve

    Double-click the file serve.desktop in the repository directory.

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

    tdoc serve

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

    Running Sphinx v8.0.2
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.

    • If a 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 with 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.

Contents