Documentation

The focus here is the creation, maintenance and organization of the OpenStack documentation found at the http://docs.openstack.org site. While the Docs team helps create a good framework, it's the entire OpenStack community -- and especially contributors like you -- that provides the expert content and corrections for the documentation.

= OpenStack documentation =

Published docs and their location
The public interface to all documentation is the docs.openstack.org web site. It contains continuously updated manuals. If you like to edit one of these, see Documentation source and target locations for a list of documents and their source repositories.

Source repositories
Doc source is mirrored on GitHub. Everyone can propose changes to docs, see Documentation/HowTo. Here are the repositories that build to docs.openstack.org.

For a list of source repositories, see Deliverables.

For more information on which docs are published, see Content specification.

Releases
Lists current development release and past releases, with links to downloads and release notes (what's new and what's changed in each release as well as known issues and potential workarounds)


 * OpenStack Releases

Support
How to find or ask for support.


 * Mailing Lists
 * OpenStack Community Q & A
 * Ask OpenStack

Glossary

 * Glossary - Contains terms that are our definitions for OpenStack, cloud computing, and open source.

= Project documentation =

This is general information about OpenStack.

Development
How to contribute code to OpenStack or develop using the OpenStack projects.


 * Developer's Guide in the Infra Manual
 * How to Contribute
 * Sign the Contributor agreement
 * Design Tenets
 * Project Team Guide
 * Coding Standards
 * Getting the Code

Launchpad reference
How we use Launchpad to track features, bugs and releases.


 * Blueprints
 * Bugs
 * Launchpad groups

= Writing documentation =

First, read the Documentation Contributor Guide.


 * How to contribute to the documentation
 * Conventions to follow when writing documentation
 * DocBook to RST Migrations
 * DocImpact
 * Troubleshooting doc builds
 * Comments on Documentation
 * Rackspace's Writers Guide
 * Review Guidelines
 * Mitaka Documentation Testing - Installation Guide and Configuration Reference
 * How to make a documentation release
 * Documentation user analysis
 * Documentation/PikeDocTesting

= Admin access to to the documentation site =

There are some areas where only trusted infrastructure or doc team members have access to configure or manage part of the documentation site. Examples include:
 * FTP credentials to the Cloud Sites that houses the files for docs.openstack.org and developer.openstack.org.
 * Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) configuration.
 * Google Analytics account information and configuration.

For these shared identities, we use the following process to ensure limited access to the information that grants access.


 * At the Summit or another in-person meeting, ensure we verify identities with IDs similar to a GPG party.
 * With those identities and shared trust in place, create a server with a place to store the account information.
 * Enable access to the shared account info by granting access to the server.

Currently the infrastructure core team and Docs PTL has access to the FTP credentials. The Docs PTL has access to the Google CSE information and the Google Analytics account information. The Docs PTL can grant access to the shared Google information. The infrastructure core team can grant access to the FTP credentials.

= PDF for Project Docs - Community Goal =

Technical Committee champion: Alexandra Settle (asettle)

Community goal: https://governance.openstack.org/tc/goals/train/pdf-doc-generation.html

During the Ocata cycle, the OpenStack-manuals, infra, and translations team worked together to enable the generation of PDF doc files from rst-based guide documents. This change generated a single downloadable PDF per Sphinx project. This means that each “book” built from a single Sphinx project could generate a PDF, allowing users who want to see documents offline the ability to do so.

The work was completed at the end of the Ocata release, but was never implemented within the project repositories. This means that our users are only able to download PDF documents for the Installation Guide, the Contributor Guide, and the Image Guide, limiting the scope for our offline users. This goal proposes we enable support across the project repositories to further our goal of being an accessible open source community.

Tracking Etherpad: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/train-pdf-support-goal

Etherpad to track common issues: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/pdf-goal-train-common-problems

Storyboard: https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/story/list?tags=pdf-doc-enabled

NOTE: Below is no longer in use

= References =

There are many additional publications about OpenStack by third party publishers. Please search for them on your favorite bookseller site.