DO NOT READ THIS FILE ON GITHUB, GUIDES ARE PUBLISHED ON https://guides.rubyonrails.org.
Ruby on Rails
Guides Guidelines
This guide documents guidelines for writing Ruby on Rails
Guides. This guide follows itself in a graceful loop, serving itself as an example.
After reading this guide, you will know:
- About the conventions to be used in
Rails
documentation. - How to generate guides locally.
Markdown
Guides are written in GitHub Flavored Markdown. There is comprehensive documentation for Markdown, as well as a cheatsheet.
Prologue
Each guide should start with motivational text at the top (that's the little introduction in the blue area). The prologue should tell the reader what the guide is about, and what they will learn. As an example, see the Routing Guide.
Headings
The title of every guide uses an h1
heading; guide sections use h2
headings; subsections use h3
headings; etc. Note that the generated HTML output will use heading tags starting with <h2>
.
Guide Title
===========
Section
-------
### Sub Section
When writing headings, capitalize all words except for prepositions, conjunctions, internal articles, and forms of the verb "to be":
#### Assertions and Testing Jobs inside Components
#### Middleware Stack is an Array
#### When are Objects Saved?
Use the same inline formatting as regular text:
##### The `:content_type` Option
Notes, Tips and Warnings
Sometimes a paragraph deserves a little more attention. For example, to clarify a common misunderstanding or warn about something that could break an application.
To highlight a paragraph, prefix it with NOTE:
, TIP:
or WARNING:
:
NOTE: Use {NOTE}, {TIP} or {WARNING} to highlight a paragraph.
This will wrap the paragraph in a special container resulting in the following:
NOTE: Use NOTE
, TIP
or WARNING
to highlight a paragraph.
NOTE
Use NOTE
to highlight something in relation to the subject and the context.
Reading it will help your understanding of that subject or context, or
clarify an important item.
For example, a section describing locale files could have the following NOTE
:
NOTE: You need to restart the server when you add new locale files.
TIP
A TIP
is just an additional bit of information regarding the subject, but not
necessarily relevant to the understanding. It can point you to another guide or
website:
TIP: To learn more about routing, see Rails Routing from the Outside In.
Or show a helpful command to see more options to dig deeper:
TIP: For further help with generators, run bin/rails generate --help
.
WARNING
Use WARNING
for things to avoid that could break the application:
WARNING: Refrain from using methods like update
, save
, or any other methods
that cause side effects on the object within your callback methods.
Or warn about things that could compromise your application's security.
WARNING: Keep your master key safe. Do not commit your master key.
Links
Use descriptive links and avoid "here" and "more" links:
# BAD
See the Rails Internationalization (I18n) API documentation for [more
details](i18n.html).
# GOOD
See the [Rails Internationalization (I18n) API documentation](i18n.html) for
more details.
Use descriptive links for internal links as well:
# BAD
We will cover this [below](#multiple-callback-conditions).
# GOOD
We will cover this in the [multiple callback conditions
section](#multiple-callback-conditions) shown below.
Linking to the API
Links to the API (api.rubyonrails.org
) are processed by the guides generator in the following manner:
Links that include a release tag are left untouched. For example
https://api.rubyonrails.org/v5/classes/ActiveRecord/Attributes/ClassMethods.html
is not modified.
Please use these in release notes, since they should point to the corresponding version no matter the target being generated.
If the link does not include a release tag and edge guides are being generated, the domain is replaced by edgeapi.rubyonrails.org
. For example,
https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionDispatch/Response.html
becomes
https://edgeapi.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionDispatch/Response.html
If the link does not include a release tag and release guides are being generated, the Rails version is injected. For example, if we are generating the guides for v5.1.0 the link
https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionDispatch/Response.html
becomes
https://api.rubyonrails.org/v5/classes/ActionDispatch/Response.html
Please don't link to edgeapi.rubyonrails.org
manually.
Column Wrapping
Do not reformat old guides just to wrap columns. But new sections and guides should wrap at 80 columns.
API Documentation Guidelines
The guides and the API should be coherent and consistent where appropriate. In particular, these sections of the API Documentation Guidelines also apply to the guides:
HTML Guides
Before generating the guides, make sure that you have the latest version of
Bundler installed on your system. To install the latest version of Bundler, run gem install bundler
.
If you already have Bundler installed, you can update with gem update bundler
.
Generation
To generate all the guides, just cd
into the guides
directory, run bundle install
, and execute:
$ bundle exec rake guides:generate
or
$ bundle exec rake guides:generate:html
Resulting HTML files can be found in the ./output
directory.
To process my_guide.md
and nothing else use the ONLY
environment variable:
$ touch my_guide.md
$ bundle exec rake guides:generate ONLY=my_guide
By default, guides that have not been modified are not processed, so ONLY
is rarely needed in practice.
To force processing all the guides, pass ALL=1
.
If you want to generate guides in a language other than English, you can keep them in a separate directory under source
(e.g. source/es
) and use the GUIDES_LANGUAGE
environment variable:
$ bundle exec rake guides:generate GUIDES_LANGUAGE=es
If you want to see all the environment variables you can use to configure the generation script just run:
$ rake
Validation
Please validate the generated HTML with:
$ bundle exec rake guides:validate
Particularly, titles get an ID generated from their content and this often leads to duplicates.
Kindle Guides
Generation
To generate guides for the Kindle, use the following rake task:
$ bundle exec rake guides:generate:kindle