Introduction

This repository contains the documentation for openHAB.

The result is available at http://docs.openhab.org/

Contributing to the Documentation

The documentation is a community effort, so everyone is welcome to suggest changes, add new sections and fix bugs. This is done exactly the same way as for the code repositories, simply through pull requests against this repo. Please read the contribution guidelines for details.

Prerequisites

Our documentation is built with Jekyll and served through Github Pages.

In order to run Jekyll locally, you also need Ruby being installed. Please see the Jekyll installation instructions for details.

An alternative for a local setup is a virtual machine provided by Vagrant.

Serving Locally

Once you have Jekyll installed and the repository checked out, simply run

jekyll serve

from within the repository root folder and point your browser to http://localhost:4000. This will give you a preview of the documentation in the same way as it will appear on docs.openhab.org once your PR is merged. Changes to the markdown files will automatically be taken into account as Jekyll re-generates the pages on the fly.

Serving via Vagrant VM

You can also have a virtual machine serving a Jekyll and webserver instance for you, without changing your base system or being limited by it. The virtual machine will run in the background, process your changes to the source and presenting the results on your hosts http://localhost:4000. A Vagrant machine configured by a Vagrantfile file is provided for that purpose.

You need to have VirtualBox and Vagrant installed. After that, it's as easy as:

/path-to/openhab-docs$ vagrant up

Automatically Generated Parts

Please note that a few parts of this repository MUST NOT BE MANUALLY EDITED! These are copied from the source code repositories and some files are generated from them. These files/folders are:

• addons_*
• concepts

The generation/update of these files can be triggered through bash update-external-resources.sh in the repo root. The process will create a temporary folder .external-resources, which is only used by the update script and can be ignored.

About the _addons_* Folders

See Jekyll Collections for general details. The folders represent collections of the different Addons types.

If you are here to help improve one of the contained READMEs, read carefully. These files are mere copies of files in other repositories and will be overwritten on a regular basis. Please find the original repository and add your contribution there.

At the time of this writing, the folders are automatically created and updated by the toolchain

• update-external-resources.sh → pom.xml → process_addons.groovy

Configuration of the collections happens through _config.yml. The most important setting you need to be aware of, is, that all files in collections are mapped to certain paths:

• e.g. _addons_bindings\astro\readme.md → docs.openhab.org/addons/bindings/astro/readme.html

Check the mentioned files for more details.

Documentation Versioning

Just as openHAB is released in versions, the documentation website provides fixed versions of the documentation articles, e.g., docs.openhab.org/2.1.0/installation/linux.html

Please see this issue for all details regarding the current implementation. In short, the following has to be considered:

• Versions like "v2.1.0" are marked by git tags.
• Based on tags branches like "v2.1.0-patch" are created, to include later discovered changes (like fixed links).
• The intended base folder for the version needs to be set in _config.yml, e.g. baseurl: "/v2.1.0".
• New versions have to be added to the dropdown menu shown on the resulting website, configured in _includes/versioning.html.
• The version branch has to be generated with jekyll, the resulting content goes into the version folder identical to the above set baseurl. Execute e.g. jekyll build -d path/to/checked-out/gh-pages-branch/v2.1.0/
• The generated static page files under, e.g., v2.1.0/ need to be committed to gh-pages for GitHub Pages to pick them up and include in the generated page.