Writing VPP Documentation

These instructions show how the VPP documentation sources are built.

The VPP Documents are written using reStructuredText (rst), or markdown (md). These files are then built using the Sphinx build system Sphinx.

Building the docs

Start with a clone of the vpp repository.

$ git clone https://gerrit.fd.io/r/vpp
$ cd vpp

Build the html index.html file:

$ make docs

Delete all the generated files with the following:

$ make docs-clean

View the results

If there are no errors during the build process, you should now have an index.html file in your vpp/docs/_build/html directory, which you can then view in your browser.

Whenever you make changes to your .rst files that you want to see, repeat this build process.

Writing Docs and merging

Documentation should be added as .rst file in the ./src/ tree next to the code it refers to. A symlink should be added at the relevant place in the ./docs folder and a link in the appropriate place in the tree.

To ensure documentation is correctly inserted, you can run

$ ./extras/scripts/check_documentation.sh

VPP documents are reviewed and merged like and other source code. Refer to Getting a Patch Reviewed to get your changes reviewed and merged.