Terraform Website

This repository contains the build infrastructure and some of the content for terraform.io. Pull requests from the community are welcomed!

Table of Contents

• How the Site Works
• Where the Docs Live
• Deploying Changes to terraform.io
• Running the Site Locally
• Previewing Changes from Terraform Core
• Writing Normal Docs Content
• Screenshots
• Navigation Sidebars
• Using Submodules
• Finding Broken Links
• More about stable-website

How the Site Works

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terraform.io is in transition at the moment, and the production site is kind of hybrid:

• Fastly handles all the traffic.

• The following paths (all marketing content, at the moment) are proxied to a Next.js app running on Vercel:

  • / (the front page)
  • /community
  • /cloud (and all sub-paths under /cloud)

  For help with these pages, talk to the Web Platform team!

• The rest of the site falls through to static pages built with Middleman. That's what this repository manages!

Where the Docs Live

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Docs live in a couple different repos. (To find a page the easy way: view it on terraform.io and click the "Edit this page" link at the bottom.)

• This repository, under content/source/docs/:

  • Terraform Cloud docs
  • Terraform Enterprise docs
  • Plugin Development
  • Terraform Registry Publishing

  Notable branches: master is the "live" content that gets deployed to terraform.io. The site gets redeployed for new commits to master.

• hashicorp/terraform, under website/docs:

  • Terraform CLI docs
  • Terraform Language docs

  Notable branches: stable-website is the "live" content that gets deployed to terraform.io, but docs changes should get merged to master (and/or one of the long-lived version branches) first. See More About stable-website below for more details.

• A few remaining provider repos... but those won't be here for long! All but a few have migrated to the Registry, and the rest are leaving soon.

Deploying Changes to terraform.io

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For changes in this repo

Merge the PR to master, and the site will automatically deploy in about 20m. 🙌

For changes in hashicorp/terraform

Merge the PR to main. The changes will appear in the next major Terraform release.

If you need your changes to be deployed sooner, cherry-pick them to:

• the current release branch (e.g. v1.0) and push. They will be deployed in the next minor version release (once every two weeks).
• the stable-website branch and push. They will be included in the next site deploy (see below). Note that the release process resets stable-website to match the release tag, removing any additional commits. So, we recommend always cherry-picking to the version branch first and then to stable-website when needed.

Backport Tags

Instead of cherry-picking your commits to a specific version branch, you can add the associated backport tag (e.g., "1.1-backport") to your pull request before merging. After you merge, a bot automatically creates a pull request to add your commits to the version branch (linked in your original PR). You must manually merge the auto-generated PR into the version branch.

Deployment

Currently, HashiCorp uses a CircleCI job to deploy the terraform.io site. Many people within HashiCorp can run this job manually, and it also runs automatically whenever a user in the HashiCorp GitHub org merges changes to master in this repository. Note that Terraform releases create sync commits to terraform-website, which will trigger a deploy.

New commits in hashicorp/terraform don't automatically deploy the site, but an unrelated site deploy will usually happen within a day. If you can't wait that long, you can trigger a manual CircleCI build or ask someone in the #proj-terraform-docs channel to do so:

• Log in to circleci.com, and make sure you're viewing the HashiCorp organization.
• Go to the terraform-website project's list of workflows.
• Find the most recent "website-deploy" workflow, and click the "Rerun workflow from start" button (which looks like a refresh button with a numeral "1" inside).

Running the Site Locally

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You can preview the website from a local checkout of this repo as follows:

1. Install Docker if you have not already done so.
2. Go to the top directory of this repo in your terminal, and run make website.
3. Open http://localhost:4567 in your web browser.
4. When you're done with the preview, press ctrl-C in your terminal to stop the server.

The local preview will include content from this repo and from any currently active submodules; content from inactive submodules will be 404.

While the preview is running, you can edit pages and Middleman will automatically rebuild them.

Previewing Changes from Terraform Core

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We keep documentation pertaining to core Terraform functionality in the website folder of the terraform repository. You can preview changes to those files from this repository or from inside the terraform repository itself.

From the terraform-website repository

To preview changes from a fork of Terraform core, you need to first make sure the necessary submodule is active, and then change the contents of the submodule to include your changes.

Activating

1. Init: Run git submodule init ext/terraform.

2. Update: Run git submodule update.

   The init command doesn't actually init things all the way, so if you forget to run update, you might have a bad afternoon. (For more information, see Living With Submodules below.)

Changing

Once the submodule is active, you can go into its directory to fetch and check out new commits. If you plan to routinely edit those docs, you can add an additional remote to make it easier to fetch from and push to your fork.

You can even make direct edits to the submodule's content, as long as you remember to commit them and push your branch before resetting the submodule.

For example:

$ cd ext/providers/rundeck
$ git status
... (should show either tracking stable-website branch, or some detached HEAD commit)
$ git fetch <YOUR-REPO-URL> <YOUR-BRANCH-NAME>
$ git checkout FETCH_HEAD
... (will indicate that you are in a "detached HEAD state" against your branch)

To find your fork's repo URL, use the "Clone or Download" button on the main page of your fork on GitHub.

Once you finish testing your changes, you can reset the submodule to its normal state by returning to the root of terraform-website and running git submodule update.

Note: If you're updating a nav sidebar .erb file in a provider or in Terraform core, the Middleman preview server might not automatically refresh the affected pages. The easiest way to deal with it is to stop and restart the preview server.

From the terraform repository

The build includes content from the terraform repository and the terraform-website repository, allowing you to preview the entire Terraform documentation site. You can find instructions in terraform/website/README.md.

Writing Normal Docs Content

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Our docs content uses a fairly standard Middleman-ish/Jekyll-ish format.

Files

One file per page. Filenames should usually end in .html.md or .html.markdown, which behave identically.

A page's location in the directory structure determines its URL.

• For files in this repo, the root of the site starts at content/source/.
• For files in hashicorp/terraform, the actual files live somewhere in ext/ and we use symlinks to put them somewhere under content/source/. You can check where the symlinks point with ls -l, or you can just find files with the "Edit this page" links on terraform.io.

YAML Frontmatter

Each file should begin with YAML frontmatter, like this:

---
layout: "enterprise2"
page_title: "Naming - Workspaces - Terraform Enterprise"
---

Leave a blank line before the first line of Markdown content. We use the following frontmatter keys:

• page_title (required) — The title that displays in the browser's title bar. Generally formatted as <PAGE> - <SECTION> - <PRODUCT>, like "Naming - Workspaces - Terraform Enterprise".
• layout (required) — Which navigation sidebar to display for this page. A layout called <NAME> gets loaded from ./content/source/layouts/<NAME>.erb.
• description (optional) — The blurb that appears in search results, to summarize everything you'll find on this page. Auto-generated if omitted.

A long time ago we also used a sidebar_current key, but now it does nothing.

Link Style

When making a link to another page on the website:

• Always omit the protocol and hostname. (For example: /docs/configuration/index.html, not https://www.terraform.io/docs/configuration/index.html.)
• When linking within a given section of the docs, use relative links whenever possible. (For example: to link to https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/aws/r/ec2_transit_gateway.html from another AWS resource, write ./ec2_transit_gateway.html; from an AWS data source, write ../r/ec2_transit_gateway.html.) This takes less space, and makes content more portable if we need to reorganize the site in the future (spoiler: we will).

Content Formatting

Content is in Markdown, with a few local syntax additions described below. Try to keep it mostly pure Markdown; sometimes a little HTML is unavoidable, but not often.

Callouts

If you start a paragraph with a special arrow-like sigil, it will become a colored callout box. You can't make multi-paragraph callouts. For colorblind users (and for clarity in general), we try to start callouts with a strong-emphasized word to indicate their function.

Learn Tutorial Crosslink Callouts

We use a standard markdown snippet when linking to a relevant Learn tutorial near the top of a page or section:

Hands-on: Try the Manage Permissions in Terraform Cloud tutorial on HashiCorp Learn.

We're (mis)using the blockquote element (>) to set these links apart from the rest of the text without causing "blue box fatigue." Also note that we're adding UTM tags to the links, to help keep track of where traffic to Learn is coming from. The snippet to use is:

> **Hands-on:** Try the [<NAME>](<URL>&utm_source=WEBSITE&utm_medium=WEB_IO&utm_offer=ARTICLE_PAGE&utm_content=DOCS) tutorial on HashiCorp Learn.

If a whole collection is relevant, you can say "try the NAME collection" instead.

Auto Header IDs

Like GitHub and a lot of other places, terraform.io automatically generates id attributes for headers to enable direct linking.

The basic transform to make IDs from header text is something like "lowercase it, delete anything other than [a-z0-9_-], and replace runs of spaces with a hyphen," but since the exact behavior can be squirrelly, we recommend checking the actual ID in a preview before linking to it. The in-page quick-nav menu at the top of each page is helpful for finding the header you want.

We also auto-generate IDs for code spans that are the first child of a list item, since it's common for long lists of arguments or attributes to be formatted that way.

Screenshots

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Some areas of documentation (mostly Terraform Cloud) make extensive use of screenshots. If you're adding or updating screenshots, please try to make them:

• 1024px wide
• As tall as necessary to show the content and any necessary context, but not taller
• 1x resolution

Both Firefox and Chrome have "responsive design" views for simulating various devices; this should let you lock the width and set the DPR to 1. (Firefox also has an integrated screenshot feature, located under the "dot dot dot" menu in the address bar.)

If the page you're screenshotting looks unusable at 1024px wide, make it a bit wider and just get as close as you can. The main goal is to just avoid weirdly big or weirdly small text in comparison to other screenshots.

Navigation Sidebars

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Every page should be reachable from a navigation sidebar, with only rare exceptions. If you create a new page, add it to the relevant sidebar.

Sidebars are in .erb files, and can be found in content/source/layouts/ (this repo) or website/layouts/ (terraform core). A page uses the sidebar file that matches the layout key in its YAML frontmatter (plus the .erb extension).

Sidebars generally look like this:

<% wrap_layout :inner do %>
  <% content_for :sidebar do %>
    <h4>TITLE</h4>

    <ul class="nav docs-sidenav">
      <li>
        <a href="...">SECTION LINK</a>
        <ul class="nav">
          <li>
            <a href="...">PAGE IN SECTION</a>
          </li>
          ...
        </ul>
      </li>
    </ul>

    <%= partial("layouts/otherdocs", :locals => { :skip => "Terraform Enterprise" }) %>
  <% end %>
  <%= yield %>
<% end %>

CSS Classes for Sidebars

• nav -- Every <ul> in the sidebar should have this.
• docs-sidenav -- The outermost <ul> should also have this.
• nav-auto-expand -- Used for inner <ul>s that should default to "open" whenever their parent is opened. Useful for when you want to separate things into subcategories but don't want to require an extra click to navigate into those subcategories.
• nav-visible -- Used for inner <ul>s that should always display as "open," regardless of the current page. Use this sparingly, and avoid using it for large sections; readers can use the "expand all" control if they need to see everything at once.

A lot of existing sidebars have a ton of ERB tags that call a sidebar_current method. Ignore or remove these, and don't add more of them. They were part of a hack that we don't use anymore.

You don't need to add anything special to a sidebar to get the dynamic JavaScript open/close behavior, but note that the "expand all" and filter controls are only added for sidebars with more than a certain number of links.

Using Submodules

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Submodules are used in this project to allow teams that work on different parts of terraform that are housed in different repos to all be able to contribute docs to the docs website at their own pace and in the way they prefer, while keeping the documentation content alongside the core code.

Right now, there are two submodules included in this project: hashicorp/terraform and hashicorp/terraform-cdk. (We used to have a lot more, back when we hosted the documentation for most providers on terraform.io.)

In your local checkout of this repo, Git submodules can be active or inactive. The first time you clone the repo, unless you have modified your git command defaults, the submodules will all default to being inactive, and their folders will be empty. To activate all submodules, run git init submodule. To activate only certain submodules, a path can be passed to the command as such: git submodule init <PATH>. To switch a submodule back to bring inactive git submodule deinit <PATH> can be used, though this is not typically necessary.

Once you init a submodule, you usually need to run git submodule update, which will either do the initial checkout or update the working copy to the commit that terraform-website currently expects. Every time that changes are made to the upstream repo that the submodule represents, it will need to be updated as well.

If a submodule shows up as "changed" in git status but you haven't done anything with it, it probably means that the upstream repo of a submodule was updated and you need to "pull" that update to point to the most recent commit. Run git submodule update to resolve this and you should see a clean git status return. Inactive submodules don't show up in git status.

In general, you should never need to commit a submodule update to terraform-website; they're updated automatically during releases, and deploys use fresh content from the upstream stable-website branch anyway. If you are going to commit and see a submodule as "changed" in git status, you probably need to update the submodule to the most recent commit in the upstream repo using git submodule update. If that doesn't work, please reach out to a team member for support -- committing changes to a submodule can cause serious issues.

Avoid running git rm on a submodule unless you know what you're doing. You usually want git submodule deinit instead.

Finding Broken Links

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Terraform.io uses a few different link checkers, which run as CircleCI jobs. If a link checking job fails, you can go to the job in CircleCI to find out which link URL caused the problem and which page that link appeared on.

All of these jobs are configured in ./circleci/config.yml, in this repo and in hashicorp/terraform.

Global Link Check

We run a global link check for the whole site after every deploy.

• Where: The job reports its status in the #proj-terraform-docs channel in Hashicorp's Slack.
• What: This job only checks internal links within terraform.io, not external links to the rest of the web. (It runs frequently, and we don't want to be a nuisance.)
• Who: The Terraform Education team is ultimately responsible for dealing with any broken links this turns up, but anyone in the channel is welcome to fix something if they see it first!
• How: We're using filiph/linkcheck for this. In addition to checking links, this also warms up the Fastly cache for the site.

PR Link Check

We run a targeted link check for docs PRs, in this repo and in hashicorp/terraform.

• Where: It shows up as a GitHub PR check. It only runs for PRs from people in the HashiCorp GitHub organization (which should be fine, since we're the most likely to change a bunch of links at once.)
• What: This job only checks links in the content area (not navs/headers) of pages that were changed in the current PR. It checks both internal and external links.
• Who: If this job is red in your PR, please fix your broken links before merging! Alternately, if it throws a false-positive and complains about a link that is actually fine, make sure to explain that before merging.
• How: This is a custom Ruby script, because we weren't able to find an off-the-shelf link checker that met our requirements (i.e. don't complain about problems that have nothing to do with this PR). (content/scripts/check-pr-links.rb)

Known Incoming Link Check

We run a weekly check to make sure we don't delete popular pages without redirecting them somewhere useful.

• Where: The job reports its status mid-morning (PST) every Monday, in the #proj-terraform-docs channel in Hashicorp's Slack.
• What: This job checks a list of paths from the content/scripts/testdata/incoming-links.txt file.
• Who: The Terraform Education team is ultimately responsible for dealing with any broken links this turns up, but anyone in the channel is welcome to fix something if they see it first!
• How: This is a custom shell script that uses wget. (content/scripts/check-incoming-links.sh)

More About stable-website

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Terraform has a special stable-website branch with docs for the most recent release. When the website is deployed, it uses the current content of stable-website.

When we release a new version of Terraform, we automatically force-push the corresponding commit to stable-website. (We also automatically update the ext/terraform submodule in this repo, but that's only for convenience when doing local previews; normal deployment to terraform.io ignores the current state of the submodules.)

Between releases, we update docs on the master branch and on the current release's maintenance branch (like v0.14). By default, we assume these updates are relevant to a future release, so we don't display them on the website yet. If a docs update should be shown immediately, cherry-pick it onto stable-website after it has been merged to master and/or the maintenance branch.

This happens routinely, so anyone who can merge to master should also be able to merge to (or directly push) stable-website. Whoever clicks the merge button should make sure they know whether this commit needs a cherry-pick.

Be aware: Since stable-website gets forcibly reset during releases, make sure to never commit new changes to stable-website. You should only commit cherry-picks from a long-lived branch.