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Ruby on Rails Guides Guidelines

This guide documents guidelines for writing Ruby on Rails Guides. This guide follows itself in a graceful loop, serving itself as an example.

After reading this guide, you will know:

1 Markdown

Guides are written in GitHub Flavored Markdown. There is comprehensive documentation for Markdown, as well as a cheatsheet.

2 Prologue

Each guide should start with motivational text at the top (that's the little introduction in the blue area). The prologue should tell the reader what the guide is about, and what they will learn. As an example, see the Routing Guide.

3 Headings

The title of every guide uses an h1 heading; guide sections use h2 headings; subsections use h3 headings; etc. Note that the generated HTML output will use heading tags starting with <h2>.

Guide Title
===========

Section
-------

### Sub Section

When writing headings, capitalize all words except for prepositions, conjunctions, internal articles, and forms of the verb "to be":

#### Middleware Stack is an Array
#### When are Objects Saved?

Use the same inline formatting as regular text:

##### The `:content_type` Option

4 Linking to the API

Links to the API (api.rubyonrails.org) are processed by the guides generator in the following manner:

Links that include a release tag are left untouched. For example

https://api.rubyonrails.org/v5.0.1/classes/ActiveRecord/Attributes/ClassMethods.html

is not modified.

Please use these in release notes, since they should point to the corresponding version no matter the target being generated.

If the link does not include a release tag and edge guides are being generated, the domain is replaced by edgeapi.rubyonrails.org. For example,

https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionDispatch/Response.html

becomes

https://edgeapi.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionDispatch/Response.html

If the link does not include a release tag and release guides are being generated, the Rails version is injected. For example, if we are generating the guides for v5.1.0 the link

https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionDispatch/Response.html

becomes

https://api.rubyonrails.org/v5.1.0/classes/ActionDispatch/Response.html

Please don't link to edgeapi.rubyonrails.org manually.

5 API Documentation Guidelines

The guides and the API should be coherent and consistent where appropriate. In particular, these sections of the API Documentation Guidelines also apply to the guides:

6 HTML Guides

Before generating the guides, make sure that you have the latest version of Bundler installed on your system. You can find the latest Bundler version here. As of this writing, it's v1.17.1.

To install the latest version of Bundler, run gem install bundler.

6.1 Generation

To generate all the guides, just cd into the guides directory, run bundle install, and execute:

bundle exec rake guides:generate

or

bundle exec rake guides:generate:html

Resulting HTML files can be found in the ./output directory.

To process my_guide.md and nothing else use the ONLY environment variable:

touch my_guide.md
bundle exec rake guides:generate ONLY=my_guide

By default, guides that have not been modified are not processed, so ONLY is rarely needed in practice.

To force processing all the guides, pass ALL=1.

If you want to generate guides in a language other than English, you can keep them in a separate directory under source (eg. source/es) and use the GUIDES_LANGUAGE environment variable:

bundle exec rake guides:generate GUIDES_LANGUAGE=es

If you want to see all the environment variables you can use to configure the generation script just run:

rake

6.2 Validation

Please validate the generated HTML with:

bundle exec rake guides:validate

Particularly, titles get an ID generated from their content and this often leads to duplicates. Please set WARNINGS=1 when generating guides to detect them. The warning messages suggest a solution.

7 Kindle Guides

7.1 Generation

To generate guides for the Kindle, use the following rake task:

bundle exec rake guides:generate:kindle

Feedback

You're encouraged to help improve the quality of this guide.

Please contribute if you see any typos or factual errors. To get started, you can read our documentation contributions section.

You may also find incomplete content or stuff that is not up to date. Please do add any missing documentation for main. Make sure to check Edge Guides first to verify if the issues are already fixed or not on the main branch. Check the Ruby on Rails Guides Guidelines for style and conventions.

If for whatever reason you spot something to fix but cannot patch it yourself, please open an issue.

And last but not least, any kind of discussion regarding Ruby on Rails documentation is very welcome on the rubyonrails-docs mailing list.