Contributors Guide

This page will go into detail on how to contribute to the Pocket Network documentation site at https://docs.pokt.network. If you are familiar with Markdown and contributing to an open-source repo on GitHub, the Quick setup section may be all you need.

Required installations

There are only 2 tools needed to get started contributing to the documentation:

1. Hugo version 0.93 or newer
2. Git

Installing Hugo

For this guide, we’ll cover the easiest way to install Hugo, which is downloading an already built executable. If you would prefer to install from a package manager like brew, chocolately, or apt, then you should follow along with the corresponding Hugo installation guide.

1. Navigate to the Hugo releases page on GitHub. Find the latest release.

2. Scroll down until you see a heading called Assets.

3. Click the appropriate build for your system to download it.

hugo.exe
LICENSE
README.md

choco install hugo -confirm

scoop install hugo

mkdir -p ~/bin

cd ~/bin

tar -xvzf ~/Downloads/hugo_<ver>_macOS-<ARCH>.tar.gz

which hugo

echo $SHELL

echo "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin" >> ~/.zprofile

echo "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin" >> ~/.bash_profile

brew install hugo

port install hugo

snap install hugo

sudo pacman -Syu hugo

sudo dnf install hugo

sudo zypper install hugo

doas pkg_add hugo

Install git

git --version

sudo apt install git

sudo pacman -Syu git

sudo dnf install git

sudo zypper install git

doas pkg_add git

Recommended installations

While Hugo and Git are everything you need to get up and running, we recommend setting up an environment that will take care of content editing, managing Git changes, and running the Hugo commands all in one place.

If you already have a text editor of choice such as vim, emacs, or SublimeText, check out the Editor plugins for Hugo page. This will show how to integrate Hugo with your familiar environment.

If you don’t have a text editor of choice, we recommend installing Visual Studio Code. It comes built with the tools we need to work with Hugo and Git without having to resort to a command line.

Once you have Visual Studio Code installed, launch it and install the following plugins:

• Hugo Language and Syntax Support
• Hugo Helper

If you’d prefer to use your own tools, know that you’ll be expected to do the following:

• Start and stop the Hugo live server from the command line.
• Manage Git changes and commits from the command line.
• Edit Markdown files directly from a text editor like Notepad or nano, not a document editor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Running a local server

You can see local changes made before committing to the repo.

To start a local Hugo server:

1. Open a terminal and change into the directory where you checked out the repo.

2. Run hugo serve.

3. Open http://localhost:1313 in a browser.

Saving any file will cause the page to be automatically updated in the browser.

Making changes

Editing existing pages

To edit an existing page, you can open a Markdown file in a text editor, make any textual changes you’d like, and save the file. If you are running a local server, you will be able to immediately see the changes as they will appear.

Adding pages to existing sections

If you want to add content, simply create a new markdown file in the content directory in the directory you want the content to live in.

Once created, each file needs a front matter (header), which can be either yaml, toml, or json specifying the following 3 things: title, menuTitle, weight.

The following shows an example of the front matter for a Glossary page:

---
title: Glossary
menuTitle: Glossary
weight: 10
---

• The title represents what the page will be referred to as in the browser tab, as well as in link tooltips, and possibly in external cards that are displayed in tweets and in message previews.
• The menuTitle represents what the page will be called in the navigation sidebar.
• The weight determines the order in which pages in that same section level will be ordered. If we wanted a page to come before this in the tree, we would need to give it a weight smaller than 10, and if we wanted a page to come after this in the tree, we would need to give it a weight larger than 10.

After the front matter, the rest of the content in the page can be created in Markdown, as well as a handful of “shortcodes” that can be used to embed slightly more sophisticated elements easily.

Let’s look at the “Own POKT” section (found at https://docs.pokt.network). This is how the directory looks:

├── | pokt
│   ├── _index.md   ["Own POKT"]
│   ├── buy.md      ["Buy POKT"]
│   ├── stake.md    ["Stake POKT"]
│   └── wallets.md  ["POKT Wallets"]

While the navigation displays the following:

This should make sense, as the weights to buy.md, stake.md and wallets.md are 20, 30, and 10, respectively.

Adding new sections

Sections are defined by directories with an _index.md file in them. The site also has an _index.md file that serves as the home page in the root of content/. As mentioned above, sections are ordered by their weights relative to other pages in their section. Sections are ordered against each other by the weight listed in the corresponding _index.md.

To add a new section, create a new directory under content/ and add an _index.md file. You can also add any additional markdown files in that directory, as described above.