This repo holds the official Arches documentation, published at https://arches.readthedocs.io. It uses reStructuredText, built with Sphinx.

Note: Historically we have used the .txt extension, but we are slowly moving to using .rst so that GitHub will render nice previews (see #255). If you are creating new documentation, please use .rst.

If you find a problem with the documentation, or feel that something is lacking, first look through the existing issues in this repo to see if someone has already reported the problem, and then add your input to the ticket (at least a thumbs up!). If no ticket exists for the problem, please create a new one and add as much detail as possible.

We welcome content contributions. Please begin by forking this repo. To contribute you will make changes to your fork, and then make pull requests to ask that those changes be incorporated here.

You can edit your fork either directly in Github (good for very small or non-complex edits) or by cloning and building the documentation locally (necessary for substantial edits).

In either case, you'll need to consider whether your documentation contribution should be for the current stable release of Arches, for a new/unreleased feature, or for both. Because of our branch versioning system (see below), your answer will require slightly different workflows. If you are new to Github, and the answer is both, then please follow the steps for new/unreleased features below, and we'll help you figure the rest out.

• To document new/unreleased features (arches.readthedocs.io/en/latest)

  • Make a new branch from master
    • Name it master_<description of change>, e.g. master_update_installation_steps
  • Commit your changes -- push to your repo
    • Please put the ticket number your commit addresses in the commit message, e.g. "make small text update for #175"
  • Make a PR here against master.

• To update documentation for the current release (arches.readthedocs.io/en/stable)

  • Make a new branch from the highest numbered branch.
    • Name it <branch number>_<description of change>, e.g. 5.0_update_installation_steps
  • Commit your changes -- push to your repo
    • Please put the ticket number your commit addresses in the commit message, e.g. "make small text update for #175"
  • Make a PR against the original branch, e.g. 5.0.

• To update documentation for new and stable releases

  • Make a new branch from master
    • Name it master_<description of change>, e.g. master_update_installation_steps
  • Commit your changes -- push to your repo
  • Run git reflog and copy the hashes for all of the new commits you have made.
  • Switch to the highest numbered branch
  • Make a new branch
    • Name it <branch number>_<description of change>, e.g. 5.0_update_installation_steps
  • Run git cherry-pick <hash> for each of hashes you have recorded -- push to your repo
  • Make 2 PRs in this repo:
    • One will compare your master_... branch to this master branch
    • One will compare your 5.0_... branch to this 5.0 branch

Thank you!

A separate branch is maintained for each minor release of Arches, from 2.1 to the current release. This is mainly to play nice with Read the Docs, but also to allow discrete updates to specific documentation at any time. However, this means that merging between version branches should never happen.

In Read the Docs, the branch with the highest version number will be used for the "stable" build (arches.readthedocs.io/en/stable), while the master branch will be used for the "latest" build (arches.readthedocs.io/en/latest).

When a new release of Arches is made, we'll branch master off into a new numbered branch, and it will become the new "stable" documentation.

Any documentation for unreleased features should be committed to master. Any documentation updates for existing releases should be committed to the appropriate branch, and where applicable we use git cherry-pick to apply specific commits to master as well.

• install

  first create and activate a python virtual environment. then:

  git clone https://github.com/<your gh username>/arches-docs
  cd arches-docs
  pip install -r requirements.txt
  

• build with auto-refresh (recommended)

  sphinx-autobuild docs docs/_build/html
  

  • view at http://127.0.0.1:8000

    Whenever a file is changed the docs will automatically be rebuilt and the browser will be refreshed.

• build manually

  cd docs
  make html
  cd _build/html
  python -m http.server
  

  • view at http://127.0.0.1:8000

• to build a non-master version, just checkout the appropriate branch

  git fetch --all
  git branch 4.1.1 origin/4.1.1
  

Note: You may want to delete the _build directory between builds of different versions, or if big changes have been made.

Use the :ref: directive to link to any header anywhere in the docs, doesn't matter what page it is on. Two examples:

Given that there is a header (of any level) somewhere in the documentation that looks like

Arches Collector Workflow
-------------------------

• reStructured Text

    See :ref:`Arches Collector Workflow` for more information.
  

• Result

  See Arches Collector Workflow for more information.

• reStructured Text

    See the :ref:`collector docs <Arches Collector Workflow>` for more information.
  

• Result

  See the collector docs for more information.

If you want an image that is a hyperlink to the file itself, use a figure instead of an image. The figure is automatically turned into a link, but only if a height or width attribute is set.

.. figure:: ../images/datamodel-arches-4.4.1-032119.svg
    :width: 100%
    :align: center

    Data model showing only Arches models. (including a caption is optional but encouraged)

Previously we had used

.. image:: ../images/datamodel-full-4.4.1-032119.svg
    target: /_images/datamodel-full-4.4.1-032119.svg

and while this works on a local build, it does not work when published in RTD (archesproject#120).

• Arches code-base: https://github.com/archesproject/arches
• Arches community forum: https://community.archesproject.org/
• reStructuredText primer: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/basics.html

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