Deployment guides

As of the Newton release, a new method of publishing deployment guides has been implemented. This allows each deployment projects to create their own deployment guide, based on a standard template, in their own repository. These guides are then centrally published to Deployment Guides.

Note

This set up is designed for deployment projects to make their installation information public. This does not include further content for end users. For example, configuration content, troubleshooting, or administration procedures.

If you would like to refer users to more content, use cross reference links to your developer documentation within the guide.

Setting up

1. Install cookiecutter:

   # pip install cookiecutter
   

2. Run the Install Guide cookiecutter to create a skeleton for your project:

   Important

   The Install Guide cookiecutter is also used for the deployment guides. However, the rest of these instructions are specific to the deployment guide creation.

   $ cookiecutter https://opendev.org/openstack/installguide-cookiecutter.git --checkout HEAD^1
   

   You will be prompted to answer questions to complete the installation. Content is then added to the deploy-guide directory in the top-level of the project repository.

3. Create a tox.ini environment for the deploy-guide in your project repository, using this content:

   [testenv:deploy-guide]
   whitelist_externals = rm
   commands =
           rm -rf deploy-guide/build
           sphinx-build -a -E -W -d deploy-guide/build/doctrees -b html deploy-guide/source deploy-guide/build/html
   

4. Add your deployment guide content, and test the build locally with tox:

   $ tox -e deploy-guide
   

   The local build is in deploy-guide/build/html.

5. Add the Python package openstackdocstheme to the test-requirements.txt file. Copy the exact requirement line from the global file:

   openstackdocstheme>=1.5.0  # Apache-2.0
   

6. Commit the changes to your project repository for review.

After these changes merge, you can set up the jobs for building in the OpenStack Infra project-config repository:

1. Clone the project-config repo:

   $ git clone https://opendev.org/openstack/project-config
   

2. In jenkins/jobs/projects.yaml, add deploy-guide-jobs within the entry for your project:

   - project:
     name: <project-name>
   
     jobs:
     ...
      - deploy-guide-jobs:
          service: <service-name>
   

   project-name and service-name are the project name, and the specific service name. One example is orchestration for heat.

   This defines the jobs using the JJB deploy-guide-jobs job-template.

3. In zuul/layout.yaml, locate the entry for your project and add the deploy-guide-jobs template:

   - name: openstack/<project-name>
     template:
       - name: deploy-guide-jobs
   

   This schedules the Deploy Guide jobs.

4. Commit the changes to the infra repository for review.

To update the main index pages with a link to your deployment guide, see Template generator details.

Deployment guide and installation guide links

If you have links between your deployment guide or installation guide and your normal documents, you need to take extra care that the links work. Any links to your old installation guide will now point to nothing.

We recommend adding conditional branch names for documentation links within your repo. Documents generated this way will always point to the live URLs, not to HTML, generated for a gate job.

The link generation is done via the sphinx.ext.extlinks extension, allowing for defining custom link generation roles. This achieves the desired behavior in terms of dynamic link construction, but does alter the standard linking conventions.

Usage for the deploy guide is as follows:

:deploy_guide:`Link title text <last-part-of-url.html>`

For an example, and more information, please review the following OpenStack-Ansible patch: Add conditional branch names for docs links