Pivotal Cloud Foundry Partners Template

This template helps partners prepare documentation for Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) partner services that appear on Pivotal Network.

Overview

Every partner service in PCF is documented on our PCF documentation site. The links to these partner service docs appear on the front page under Partner Services for Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

For a good example of a partner service doc, see ISS Knowtify Search Analytics.

How To Use This Template

Partners use this template to develop the documentation for their PCF service. This repo currently includes templates for the following topics:

• index.html.md.erb: The index of your docs.
• installing.html.md.erb: How to install and configure your product tile.
• using.html.md.erb: How to use your product.
• release-notes.html.md.erb: Release notes for your product.

To begin using this repo to develop your documentation, perform the following steps:

1. Make a fork of this repo.
2. Clone your fork onto your local machine.
3. Work your way through each topic, replacing the placeholders in ALL-CAPS and following the instructions in bold.
4. Complete the subnav by replacing the placeholders in ALL-CAPS in the subnav file at docs-book/master_middleman/source/subnavs/myservice_subnav.erb in this repo.
5. View your documentation as a live local site in a browser, by following the steps below in the How To Use Bookbinder To View Your Docs section.
6. When you've finished your documentation, make a pull request to merge your fork into this repo and email the PCF Docs Team at cf-docs@pivotal.io.

How To Use Bookbinder To View Your Docs

Bookbinder is a command-line utility for stitching Markdown docs into a hostable web app. The PCF Docs Team uses Bookbinder to publish our docs site, but you can also use Bookbinder to view a live version of your documentation on your local machine.

Bookbinder draws the content for the site from docs-content, the subnav from docs-book, and various layout configuration and assets from docs-layout.

To use Bookbinder to view your documentation, perform the following steps:

1. Install Bookbinder by running gem install bookbindery. If you have trouble, consult the Zero to Bookbinder section to make sure you have the correct dependencies installed.
2. On your local machine, cd into docs-book in the cloned repo.
3. Run bundle install to make sure you have all the necessary gems installed.
4. Build your documentation site with bookbinder in one of the two following ways:
   • Run bookbinder watch to build an interactive version of the docs and navigate to localhost:4567/myservice/ in a browser. (It may take a moment for the site to load at first.) This builds a site from your content repo at docs-content, and then watches that repo to update the site if you make any changes to the repo.
   • Run bookbinder bind local to build a Rack web-app of the book. After the bind has completed, cd into the final_app directory and run rackup. Then navigate to localhost:9292/myservice/ in a browser.

Zero to Bookbinder: How to Install Bookbinder and Build, View, and Edit Your Docs from Nothing

If you are reading this, Pivotal has invited you to a git repo where you can build and edit documentation in the Ruby / Markdown / HTML format that the online publishing tool Bookbinder uses to build Pivotal's documentation.

Here's how to install Bookbinder and build your docs from the repo, starting from scratch, on a Mac OS X machine.

Note: All steps below are implicitly preceded with, "If you haven't already..." You should skip any installation steps that have already contributed to your environment.

Install Ruby

In Terminal window:

1. Make and cd into a workspace directory.

   $ mkdir workspace

   $ cd workspace

2. Follow the instructions at http://brew.sh to install brew / homebrew

   $ /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

3. Install your own (non-system) ruby.

   $ brew install ruby

Set up Git

1. Download and Install git by following the instructions at git-scm.com.

2. Install your own (non-system) bash-completion (optional).

   $ brew install git bash-completion

3. If you don't already have one, generate a public/private RSA key pair, and save the key to your ~/.ssh directory.

   $ ssh-keygen
   Generating public/private rsa key pair.
   Enter file in which to save the key (/Users/pspinrad/.ssh/id_rsa): 
   

4. Get a Github account.

5. Add your RSA public key to your Github account / profile page.

   $ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub # copy and paste this into Github profile page as new key

Get the Correct Ruby Version

1. Install a Ruby manager such as chruby.

   $ brew install chruby

2. Add your Ruby manager to your ~/.bashrc by appending the following line:

   source /usr/local/opt/chruby/share/chruby/chruby.sh

3. Install the ruby-install installer.

   $ brew install ruby-install

4. Run ruby-install to install Ruby.

   $ ruby-install ruby 2.3

Install Bookbinder

1. Install bundler.

   $ gem install bundler

2. Install bookbinder (the bookbindery gem).

   $ gem install bookbindery

Build the Docs Locally

1. Clone the docs template repo you will be building from.

   $ git clone git@github.com:pivotal-cf/docs-partners-template

2. cd into the book subdirectory of the repo.

   $ cd docs-partners-template/docs-book

3. Run bundle install to install all book dependencies.

   $ bundle install

4. Run bookbinder watch to build the book on your machine. If it doesn't succeed, try prepending the command with bundle exec so that bookbinder uses local gems instead of global gems.

   $ bundle exec bookbinder watch

5. Browse to localhost:4567 to view the book locally and "watch" any changes that you make to source html.md.erb files. As you make and save changes to the local source files for your site, you will see them in your browser after a slight delay.

After each session of writing or revising your docs source files, commit and push them to your github repo.

Happy documenting!