Polkadot Wiki

The Source of Truth for Polkadot

• Contributing to Documentation
• Running Locally
  • Build
  • Start
  • Publish
• Style and Configuration Guide
  • Formatting
  • Static Site Generator
  • Search Engine
  • Automated Deployments
  • Mirror Pages
  • Conditional Rendering
• Internationalization
• License

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The Polkadot Wiki is the central source of truth for Polkadot. It is a community-focused initiative led by Web3 Foundation to keep an up-to-date resource on the best information for learning, building, or maintaining on Polkadot.

Contributing to Documentation

The Technical Education team at Web3 Foundation are the primary maintainers of the Wiki and will review all issues and pull requests created in this repository. If you notice typos or grammatical errors, please feel free to create pull requests with these corrections directly. Larger contributions may start as issues to test the waters on the subject with the maintainers. It is generally preferable to create a pull request over an issue to propose a change to the Wiki content.

✨ The Wiki belongs to the community, help generate its identity. ✨

identity.mp4

📥 There will be an upcoming initiative that will promote and encourage contributions towards Polkadot-based content and documentation. In the meantime, feel free to share any ideas or feedback you may have for the Wiki by opening a Feature Request issue.

Keep engaged by checking out these common Polkadot ecosystem resources.

Running Locally

Both the Polkadot Wiki and the Kusama Guide are built from the source files in this repository. After cloning the source locally, you can start the websites with each of these respective commands (ensure you run yarn at the root of the repository first to install dependencies).

Using yarn, run:

yarn install

The site is built using Docusaurus: you may need to install Docusaurus before running the Wiki locally.

yarn upgrade @docusaurus/core@latest @docusaurus/preset-classic@latest

Build

The Wiki is currently in the process of being deployed onto IPFS and will follow the same configuration to build the static files.

🐦 Building the Kusama Guide:

yarn kusama:build

🟣 Building the Polkadot Wiki:

yarn polkadot:build

Start

🐦 Starting the Kusama Guide:

yarn kusama:start

🟣 Starting the Polkadot Wiki:

yarn polkadot:start

Publish

🐦 Publishing the Kusama Guide:

yarn kusama:publish-gh-pages

🟣 Publishing the Polkadot Wiki:

yarn polkadot:publish-gh-pages

Style and Configuration Guide

Use the style guide from the Substrate Knowledge Base

Formatting

Use pretty-quick as a pre-commit formatting tool.

There is an automatic pretty-quick check that occurs pre-commit to format your changed/staged files.

To format markdown pages, run the following in the docs folder:

npx pretty-quick --staged

To run pretty on the whole project, npx pretty-quick.

Static Site Generator

The Wiki's latest version uses the Docusaurus static website generator to convert the Markdown docs into a documentation website.

Search Engine

Algolia DocSearch is the search engine that is used, which is built into Docusaurus. Indexing via Algolia provides faster lookup; the actual configuration for lookup is located in another repository that Algolia DocSearch maintains.

We have enabled searching on the Wiki by declaring the algolia section in the siteConfig.js file in scripts, and defining an API key and index name that are provided by DocSearch.

  algolia: {
    apiKey: "53c6a4ab0d77c0755375a971c9b7cc3d",
    indexName: "kusama_guide",
    algoliaOptions: {
      facetFilters: ["language:LANGUAGE"],
    }, // Optional, if provided by Algolia
  }

If you would like to access and modify this, you can re-submit the documentation url via DocSearch Program, where they will send a JavaScript snippet that you can re-integrate into the configuration, similar to the one shown above.

Automated Deployments

The Polkadot Wiki is built on the gh-pages branch and automatically deployed to GitHub Pages. The Kusama Wiki is also deployed to GitHub Pages (via a separate repository).

Development servers exist at https://staging.polkadot.network and https://staging.kusama.network. The servers will reflect the latest master commit or PR put up against the master branch by a member of the Technical Education team. The latest version of master is staged and checked by the team. If all is well, the new commits on master are transferred into the production branch,prod, by rebasing master on prod. The CICD production workflow will deploy prod to the public sites: Polkadot Wiki and Kusama Guide, respectively.

Mirror Pages

A limitation of Docusaurus is that pages can only be included in one sidebar at any given time. Thus, our Kusama section will either hijack some content it shares with the rest of the Wiki or lack that content. The repository mirrors some pages and includes them in additional sidebars to solve this.

The scripts folder contains a mirror.js script that creates a copy of the pages to duplicate across sidebars. The new pages are prefixed with mirror and must first be declared in mirror.js, then added to the relevant sidebar section. To run the script:

yarn mirror

Note: This command runs when using polkadot:start or kusama:start development scripts, so you don't need to worry about running it manually if you start the development site with one of these commands.

Conditional Rendering

The two Wikis support conditional rendering depending on which Wiki is being deployed. This is useful for mirrored pages with most content in common but have minor differences. To use this functionality, surround Kusama specific content with {{ kusama: :kusama }}, and polkadot specific content with {{ polkadot: :polkadot }}. Example:

If the treasury ends a budget period without spending all of its funds, it suffers a burn of a
percentage of its funds -- thereby causing deflationary pressure.
{{ polkadot: This percentage is currently at 1%
on Polkadot. :polkadot }}{{ kusama: This percentage is currently 0.2% on Kusama, with the amount currently 
going to [Society](https://guide.kusama.network/docs/en/maintain-guides-society-kusama) rather than being
burned. :kusama }}

To verify the appropriate values have been substituted in each scenario, run polkadot:start and kusama:start in separate terminals. If prompted with [WARNING] Something is already running on port 3000. Would you like to run the app on another port instead?, proceed with yes. This will likely launch one project on port 3000 and the other on 3001, allowing you to compare the rendered outputs for both projects locally and simultaneously.

Internationalization

We are using Crowdin to manage all different translations. You can go to the project page and select the language you would like to translate to start.
All translated content through Crowdin will regularly submit a pull request to this repository.

If you do not see the language you would like to translate in, please let us know via Matrix.

License

The Polkadot Wiki is licensed under the GPL-3.0 free software license.