KONG's Documentation Website

This repository contains the source content and code for Kong's documentation website. It's built using Jekyll and deployed with Netlify.

Here are some things to know before you get started:

• We're beginner-friendly. Whether you're a Technical Writer learning about docs-as-code or an engineer practicing your documentation skills, we welcome your involvement. If you'd like to contribute and don't have something in mind already, head on over to Issues. We've added good first issue labels on beginner-friendly issues.

• We need more help in some areas. We'd especially love some help with plugin documentation.

• Some of our docs are generated.

  • Admin API
  • CLI reference
  • OSS upgrade guide
  • PDK reference

All pull requests for these docs should be opened on the Kong/kong repository. Fork the repository and submit PRs from your fork.

For Gateway Enterprise configuration reference, open an issue on this repo and we'll update the docs.

• Community is a priority for us. Before submitting an issue or pull request, make sure to review our Contributing Guide.

• We are currently accepting plugin submissions to our plugin hub from trusted technical partners, on a limited basis. For more information, see the Kong Partners page.

Run Locally

For anything other than minor changes, clone the repository onto your local machine and build locally. Once you've installed all of the tools required, you can use our Makefile to build the docs:

# Install dependencies
make install

# Build the site and watch for changes
make run

Plugin contributors

If you have contributed a plugin, you can add a Kong badge to your plugin README.

Use the following, where you replace test with your plugin name and link-to-docs with a link to the Kong docs for your plugin.

[![](https://img.shields.io/badge/Kong-test-blue.svg?colorA=042943&colorB=00C4BB&style=flat&longCache=true&logo=data:image/png;base64,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)](link-to-docs)

Here's how the badge looks:

See Issue #908 for more information. Note that we're not currently hosting assets for badges.

Generate the PDK, Admin API, CLI, and Configuration documentation

This section is for Kong source code maintainers. You don't need to do anything here if you're contributing to this repo!

The PDK docs, Admin API docs, cli.md and configuration.md for each release are generated from the Kong source code.

To generate them, go to the Kong/kong repo and run:

scripts/autodoc <docs-folder> <kong-version>

For example:

cd /path/to/kong
scripts/autodoc ../docs.konghq.com 2.4.x

This example assumes that the Kong/docs.konghq.com repo is cloned into the same directory as the Kong/kong repo, and that you want to generate the docs for version 2.4.x. Adjust the paths and version as needed.

After everything is generated, review, open a branch with the changes, send a pull request, and review the changes.

You usually want to open a PR against a release/* branch. For example, in the example above the branch was release/2.4.

cd docs.konghq.com
git fetch --all
git checkout release/2.4
git checkout -b release/2.4-autodocos
git add -A .
git commit -m "docs(2.4.x) add autodocs"
git push

Then open a pull request against release/2.4.

Testing

Tests for this site are written using playwright and expect.js

To run the tests, you must first build the site by running make build before running make smoke.

Many of the tests are smoke tests to check issues that occurred while adding caching to the site, such as ensuring that the side navigation isn't cached.

To add your own tests, look in the tests directory and use home.test.js as a sample. You specify which URL to visit and then a CSS selector to search for, before asserting that the contents match what you expect.

test("has the 'Welcome to Kong' header", async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto("/");
  const title = page.locator("#main");
  await expect(title).toHaveText("Welcome to Kong Docs");
});

Continuous Integration

We run various quality checks at build time to ensure that the documentation is maintainable.

Some of the checks can be manually marked as approved using labels:

• ci:manual-approve:link-validation - mark link checking as successful. Useful when Netlify returns a HTTP 400 error and the links are validated manually

include-check

The include-check.sh script checks for any files in the app/_includes folder that depend on a page.* variable (e.g. page.url). This is not compatible with the include_cached gem that we use, and so using page.* in an include will fail the build.

To run the script locally, open a terminal, navigate to the documentation folder, and run ./include-check.sh. If there is no output, everything is successful.

In the following example, we can see that deployment-options-k8s.md uses a page.* variable, and that the include is used in the kong-for-kubernetes.md file:

❯ ./include-check.sh
Page variables must not be used in includes.
Pass them in via include_cached instead

Files that currently use page.*:
File: app/_includes/md/2.5.x/deployment-options-k8s.md
via:
app/enterprise/2.5.x/deployment/installation/kong-for-kubernetes.md

Here are sample contents for those files:

In kong-for-kubernetes.md:

{% include_cached app/_includes/md/2.5.x/deployment-options-k8s.md %}

In deployment-options-k8s:

This is an include that uses {{ page.url }}

To resolve this, the two files should be updated to pass in the URL when include_cached is called:

In kong-for-kubernetes.md:

{% include_cached app/_includes/md/2.5.x/deployment-options-k8s.md url=page.url %}

In deployment-options-k8s:

This is an include that uses {{ include.url }}

The include_cached gem uses all passed parameters as the cache lookup key, and this ensures that all required permutations of an include file will be generated.

For guidelines on how to write includes and call them in target topics, see the Kong Docs contributing guidelines.

Review Labels

When raising a pull request, it's useful to indicate what type of review you're looking for from the team. To help with this, we've added three labels that can be applied:

• review:copyedit: Request for writer review.
• review:general: Review for general accuracy and presentation. Does the doc work? Does it output correctly?
• review:tech: Request for technical review from an SME.

At least one of these labels must be applied to a PR or the build will fail.

Broken links

We check the documentation for broken links using broken-link-checker and some custom logic to build a list of excluded URLs.

The link checker runs in two different ways:

1. When a pull request is opened, any changed files are detected and those URLs are checked for broken links. This allows us to fix pages incrementally and ensure that we don't break any new links.
2. A full site scan, against the latest version of each product only. This allows us to check all pages for broken links. Once all broken links are fixed, we can retire this job in favour of the CI check.

To run a full site scan locally, you'll need the netlify CLI installed.

Do NOT run the link checker against production.

To run the link checker, build the site locally and start a local Netlify dev environment. From your clone of the doc repo, run:

./node_modules/.bin/gulp build
cd dist
netlify dev

Then in another terminal, from the root of your clone of the docs repo:

cd broken-link-checker
npm ci
node full.js --host http://localhost:8888

Finally, be patient. The run will take at least 5 minutes, and up to 30 minutes to complete.