Develop Documentation

There are different ways to contribute documentation, each suitable for different use cases:

  • Publish tutorials and "how to"s in our Discourse knowledge base. For example, you may want to describe how to use the Net-SNMP agent and the OpenNMS SNMP monitor to solve a special use case. This is a great way to help other OpenNMS users who might have similar questions, because we sometimes cross-reference these articles in official documentation.

  • Contribute formal technical documentation related to the source code on GitHub.

  • Pick up quickwin-docs issues from our Jira Documentation backlog. These are issues that should require only a short amount of time to address.

  • Review, suggest improvements for, and provide comments on existing documentation.

  • Report bugs, errors, or areas for improvement.

All formal technical documentation should follow a basic structure:

  • A descriptive title (for example, "Create a Minion" or "SnmpCollector").

  • A brief description of the subject being documented.

  • Procedure steps and technical content such as parameters, configuration, and examples, as appropriate.

Minimize the use of screenshots; they should be included only to illustrate a concept that may be difficult to understand, or something that is not easy to locate in the UI. See the Images section for more information.

Documentation file structure

All OpenNMS projects that have documentation include it in the docs directory. Within this directory, you will find the ./modules directory, which contains all technical documentation associated with the source code in the repository. The ./modules directory may have more nested directories to create a hierarchy for the content (for example, components and subcomponents).

You will find .adoc files in the ./pages directory or one of its subdirectories, and image files in the ./images directory or one of its subdirectories. The following table describes the documentation modules for the Meridian project:

Directory Contents

docs/modules/deployment

Documentation on how to install and configure Meridian on different operating systems.

docs/modules/development

Documentation for those who want to develop Meridian.

docs/modules/operation

Documentation for administrators to configure, optimize, and run Meridian.

docs/modules/reference

Glossary and miscellaneous configuration topics.

docs/modules/releasenotes

Changelog and release notes.

docs/modules/write-the-docs

Documentation on how to write documentation for the Meridian project.
Documentation for other OpenNMS projects (for example, opennms-alec) follows a similar hierarchy, as appropriate for the project.

Every new directory or .adoc file must be included in the general structure of the documentation, defined by the nav.adoc files:

  1. Create a new .adoc file (in this example, dosc/modules/operation/pages/meta-data.adoc).

  2. Open the directory’s nav.adoc file (in this example, docs/modules/operation/nav.adoc).

  3. Add a new bullet list entry linking to the new page.

    In this example, meta-data.adoc is located in the main /operation/pages directory, so you should add it as a level-one list item. If the document is located in a sub-directory (for example, /operation/pages/admin), you should add it as a level-two list item, and so on. To add a new level-one list item, use the following syntax:

    Level-one nav.adoc list item with defined hyperlink text
    * xref:meta-data.adoc[Meta Data]

    If you choose not to define the hyperlink text within the square brackets, the link will use the top-level heading in the specified file.

  4. Save your changes and commit them to your active repository branch.

To test your changes locally, build the documentation.