This readme was largely copied from the excellent Godot documentation, with thanks to Juan Linietsky, Ariel Manzur and the Godot community.

This documentation is published at rpki.readthedocs.io.

RPKI documentation

This repository contains the documentation for the RPKI technology, as well as the tools that NLnet Labs is developing for it, in reStructuredText markup language (reST). They are meant to be parsed with the Sphinx documentation builder to build the HTML documentation.

Contributing changes

Pull Requests should use the master branch by default.

Though arguably less convenient to edit than a wiki, this git repository is meant to receive pull requests to always improve the documentation, add new pages, etc. Having direct access to the source files in a revision control system is a big plus to ensure the quality of our documentation.

Editing existing pages

To edit an existing page, locate its .rst source file and open it in your favourite text editor. You can then commit the changes, push them to your fork and make a pull request.

Adding new pages

To add a new page, create a .rst file with a meaningful name in the section you want to add a file to, e.g. rpki/blockchain.rst. Write its content like you would do for any other file, and make sure to define a reference name for Sphinx at the beginning of the file (check other files for the syntax), based on the file name with a "doc_" prefix (e.g. .. _doc_rpki_blockchain:).

You should then add your page to the relevant "toctree" (table of contents). Add your new filename to the list on a new line, using a relative path and no extension, e.g. here blockchain.

Sphinx and reStructuredText syntax

Check Sphinx's reST Primer and the official reference for details on the syntax.

Sphinx uses specific reST comments to do specific operations, like defining the table of contents (:toctree:) or cross-referencing pages. Check the official Sphinx documentation for more details, or see how things are done in existing pages and adapt it to your needs.

Adding images and attachments

To add images, please put them in an img/ folder next to the .rst file with a meaningful name and include them in your page with:

.. image:: img/image_name.png

Similarly, you can include attachments (like assets as support material for a tutorial) by placing them into a files/ folder next to the .rst file, and using this inline markup:

:download:`myfilename.zip <files/myfilename.zip>`

Building with Sphinx

To build the HTML website (or any other format supported by Sphinx, like PDF, EPUB or LaTeX), you need to install Sphinx >= 1.3 as well as (for the HTML) the readthedocs.org theme. Only the Python 3 flavour was tested, though the Python 2 versions might work too.

Those tools are best installed using pip, Python's module installer. The Python 3 version might be provided (on Linux distros) as pip3 or python3-pip. You can then run:

pip3 install sphinx
pip3 install sphinx_rtd_theme

You can then build the HTML documentation from the root folder of this repository with:

make html

or:

make SPHINXBUILD=~/.local/bin/sphinx-build html

The compilation might take some time as the classes/ folder contains many files to parse.
You can then test the changes live by opening _build/html/index.html in your favourite browser.

Building with Sphinx on Windows

On Windows, you need to:

• Download the Python installer here.
• Install Python. Don't forget to check the "Add Python to PATH" box.
• Use the above pip commands.

Building is still done at the root folder of this repository using the provided make.bat:

make.bat html

Alternatively, you can build with this command instead:

sphinx-build -b html ./ _build

Note that during the first build, various installation prompts may appear and ask to install LaTeX plugins. Make sure you don't miss them, especially if they open behind other windows, else the build may appear to hang until you confirm these prompts.

You could also install a normal make toolchain (for example via MinGW) and build the docs using the normal make html.

Building with Sphinx and virtualenv

If you want your Sphinx installation scoped to the project, you can install it using virtualenv. Execute this from the root folder of this repository:

virtualenv --system-site-packages env/
. env/bin/activate
pip3 install sphinx
pip3 install sphinx_rtd_theme

Then do make html like above.

License

All the content of this repository is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0).