Contributing to the documentation

Your contributions are welcome! There are many ways to contribute to the documentation:

1. Identify and correct typos.

2. Improve the description of PyDAP and overall the DAP model.

3. Cookbooks! We want to know how PyDAP and OPeNDAP are being used, i.e. what kind of questions / problems is helping solve? what is the domains of expertise?

4. Demostrate an optimization to access patterns, i.e. a benchmark.

5. An OPeNDAP URL! We want to learn more about available OPeNDAP data urls, and make them accessible to the broad community of PyDAP users. We are strong proponents of data democratization and open science, and these begin by making your data Findable.

The documentation was built using jupyter-book, which supports different types of files. Here we use rst and ipynb (executable notebooks).

How to contribute to the documentation?

To add/edit the documentation, we recommend you follow the previous guides on version control, forking, and branching. That said, you can follow the steps:

1. Navitate to the cloned repository

2. Create/activate the conda environment.

conda env create -f docs/environment.yml
conda activate pydap_docs

Note

If you already have mamba installed, you can replace all conda in the commands with mamba.

The docs/environment.yml file provides a ready-to-use environment (it installs pydap-server). However, if you have made new changes to the code, we recommend installing pydap in dev mode and making sure that all notebooks properly build.

pip install -e .

or to install directly from the main branch:

pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/pydap/pydap.git

3. Create a new branch, and set its upstream and use git (see steps 3 and 4 from contributing to the code)

4. Clean any previous built html pages with

jupyter-book clean docs --all

5. Build the docs by running

jupyter-book build docs

Depending on how many changes you have done to the documentation, this last step may take a while. It also depends on the type of files added to the documentation (ipynb are slower to build).

6. Once the build process is finished, you can inspect the locally built html files by running:

open docs/_build/html/index.html

Note

Make sure to check that ALL notebooks were successfully built. This step is important because some of the notebooks require authentications. For testing the documentation it is OK to include passwords/tokens, but when you are getting ready to submit your PR for review, do not include these in the final version of your PR.

7. Push all changes and create a PR. PyDAP follows the recommendations of keeping the source files on main, and the build files on the gh-pages branch.

Note

Do not include passwords or tokens. You are only submitting source files.

8. Once a maintaner of PyDAP has approved your PR it will get merged into main. The maintainer of PyDAP can publish the documentation and update the gh-pages branch. Broadly, the steps to publish the documentation (i.e. rebuild the gh-pages branch) are detailed and described here: https://jupyterbook.org/en/stable/start/publish.html.