consul/website

Consul Website

This subdirectory contains the entire source for the Consul Website. This is a NextJS project, which builds a static site from these source files.

Contributions Welcome!

If you find a typo or you feel like you can improve the HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, we welcome contributions. Feel free to open issues or pull requests like any normal GitHub project, and we'll merge it in 🚀

Running the Site Locally

The website can be run locally through node.js or Docker. If you choose to run through Docker, everything will be a little bit slower due to the additional overhead, so for frequent contributors it may be worth it to use node. Also if you are a vim user, it's also worth noting that vim's swapfile usage can cause issues for the live reload functionality. In order to avoid these issues, make sure you have run :set backupcopy=yes within vim.

With Docker

Running the site locally is simple. Provided you have Docker installed, clone this repo, run make, and then visit http://localhost:3000.

The docker image is pre-built with all the website dependencies installed, which is what makes it so quick and simple, but also means if you need to change dependencies and test the changes within Docker, you'll need a new image. If this is something you need to do, you can run make build-image to generate a local Docker image with updated dependencies, then make website-local to use that image and preview.

With Node

If your local development environment has a supported version (v10.0.0+) of node installed you can run:

• npm install
• npm start

and then visit http://localhost:3000.

If you pull down new code from github, you should run npm install again. Otherwise, there's no need to re-run npm install each time the site is run, you can just run npm start to get it going.

Editing Content

Documentation content is written in Markdown and you'll find all files listed under the /pages directory.

To create a new page with Markdown, create a file ending in .mdx in the pages/ directory. The path in the pages directory will be the URL route. For example, pages/hello/world.mdx will be served from the /hello/world URL.

This file can be standard Markdown and also supports YAML frontmatter. YAML frontmatter is optional, there are defaults for all keys.

---
title: 'My Title'
description: "A thorough, yet succinct description of the page's contents"
---

The significant keys in the YAML frontmatter are:

• title (string) - This is the title of the page that will be set in the HTML title.
• description (string) - This is a description of the page that will be set in the HTML description.

⚠️Since api is a reserved directory within NextJS, all /api/** pages are listed under the /pages/api-docs path.

Editing Sidebars

The structure of the sidebars are controlled by files in the /data directory.

• Edit this file to change the docs sidebar
• Edit this file to change the guides sidebar
• Edit this file to change the intro sidebar

To nest sidebar items, you'll want to add a new category key/value accompanied by the appropriate embedded content values.

• category values will be directory names within the pages directory
• content values will be file names within their appropriately nested directory.

Creating New Pages

There is currently a small bug with new page creation - if you create a new page and link it up via subnav data while the server is running, it will report an error saying the page was not found. This can be resolved by restarting the server.

Changing the Release Version

To change the version of Consul displayed for download on the website, head over to data/version.js and change the number there. It's important to note that the version number must match a version that has been released and is live on releases.hashicorp.com -- if it does not, the website will be unable to fetch links to the binaries and will not compile. So this version number should be changed only after a release.

Displaying a Prerelease

If there is a prerelease of any type that should be displayed on the downloads page, this can be done by editing pages/downloads/index.jsx. By default, the download component might look something like this:

<ProductDownloader
  product="Consul"
  version={VERSION}
  downloads={downloadData}
  community="/resources"
/>

To add a prerelease, an extra prerelease property can be added to the component as such:

<ProductDownloader
  product="Consul"
  version={VERSION}
  downloads={downloadData}
  community="/resources"
  prerelease={{
    type: 'release candidate', // the type of prerelease: beta, release candidate, etc.
    name: 'v1.0.0', // the name displayed in text on the website
    version: '1.0.0-rc1', // the actual version tag that was pushed to releases.hashicorp.com
  }}
/>

This configuration would display something like the following text on the website, emphasis added to the configurable parameters:

A {{ release candidate }} for Consul {{ v1.0.0 }} is available! The release can be <a href='https://releases.hashicorp.com/consul/{{ 1.0.0-rc1 }}'>downloaded here</a>.

You may customize the parameters in any way you'd like. To remove a prerelease from the website, simply delete the prerelease paremeter from the above component.

Markdown Enhancements

There are several custom markdown plugins that are available by default that enhance standard markdown to fit our use cases. This set of plugins introduces a couple instances of custom syntax, and a couple specific pitfalls that are not present by default with markdown, detailed below:

• If you see the symbols ~>, ->, =>, or !>, these represent custom alerts. These render as colored boxes to draw the user's attention to some type of aside.

• If you see @include '/some/path.mdx', this is a markdown include. It's worth noting as well that all includes resolve from website/pages/partials by default.

• If you see # Headline ((#slug)), this is an example of an anchor link alias. It adds an extra permalink to a headline for compatibility and is removed from the output.

• Due to automatically generated permalinks, any text changes to headlines or list items that begin with inline code can and will break existing permalinks. Be very cautious when changing either of these two text items.

  Headlines are fairly self-explanitory, but here's an example of how list items that begin with inline code look.

  - this is a normal list item
  - `this` is a list item that begins with inline code
  

  Its worth noting that only the inline code at the beginning of the list item will cause problems if changed. So if you changed the above markup to...

  - lsdhfhksdjf
  - `this` jsdhfkdsjhkdsfjh
  

  ...while it perhaps would not be an improved user experience, no links would break because of it. The best approach is to avoid changing headlines and inline code at the start of a list item. If you must change one of these items, make sure to tag someone from the digital marketing development team on your pull request, they will help to ensure as much compatibility as possible.

Redirects

This website structures URLs based on the filesystem layout. This means that if a file is moved, removed, or a folder is re-organized, links will break. If a path change is necessary, it can be mitigated using redirects.

To add a redirect, head over to the _redirects file - the format is fairly simple. On the left is the current path, and on the right is the path that should be redirected to. It's important to note that if there are links to a .html version of a page, that must also be explicitly redirected. For example:

/foo       /bar
/foo.html  /bar

This redirect rule will send all incoming links to /foo and /foo.html to /bar. For more details on the redirects file format, check out the docs on netlify.

There are a couple important caveats with redirects. First, redirects are applied at the hosting layer, and therefore will not work by default in local dev mode. To test in local dev mode, you can use netlify dev, or just push a commit and check using the deploy preview.

Second, redirects do not apply to client-side navigation. By default, all links in the navigation and docs sidebar will navigate purely on the client side, which makes navigation through the docs significantly faster, especially for those with low-end devices and/or weak internet connections. In the future, we plan to convert all internal links within docs pages to behave this way as well. This means that if there is a link on this website to a given piece of content that has changed locations in some way, we need to also directly change existing links to the content. This way, if a user clicks a link that navigates on the client side, or if they hit the url directly and the page renders from the server side, either one will work perfectly.

Let's look at an example. Say you have a page called /docs/foo which needs to be moved to /docs/nested/foo. Additionally, this is a page that has been around for a while and we know there are links into /docs/foo.html left over from our previous website structure. First, we move the page, then adjust the docs sidenav, in data/docs-navigation.js. Find the category the page is in, and move it into the appropriate subcategory. Next, we add to _redirects as such:

/foo       /nested/foo
/foo.html  /nested/foo

Finally, we run a global search for internal links to /foo, and make sure to adjust them to be /nested/foo - this is to ensure that client-side navigation still works correctly. Adding a redirect alone is not enough.

One more example - let's say that content is being moved to an external website. A common example is guides moving to learn.hashicorp.com. In this case, we take all the same steps, except that we need to make a different type of change to the docs-navigation file. If previously the structure looked like:

{
  category: 'docs',
  content: [
    'foo'
  ]
}

If we no longer want the link to be in the side nav, we can simply remove it. If we do still want the link in the side nav, but pointing to an external destnation, we need to slightly change the structure as such:

{
  category: 'docs',
  content: [
    { title: 'Foo Title', href: 'https://learn.hashicorp.com/vault/foo' }
  ]
}

As the majority of items in the side nav are internal links, the structure makes it as easy as possible to represent these links. This alternate syntax is the most concise manner than an external link can be represented. External links can be used anywhere within the docs sidenav.

It's also worth noting that it is possible to do glob-based redirects, for example matching /docs/*, and you may see this pattern in the _redirects file. This type of redirect is much higher risk and the behavior is a bit more nuanced, so if you need to add a glob redirect, please reach out to the website maintainers and ask about it first.

Deployment

This website is hosted on Netlify and configured to automatically deploy anytime you push code to the stable-website branch. Any time a pull request is submitted that changes files within the website folder, a deployment preview will appear in the github checks which can be used to validate the way docs changes will look live. Deployments from stable-website will look and behave the same way as deployment previews.