Contributing Documentation

The Community is encouraged to contribute documentation back to the project as they work through use cases the developers may not have considered or documented. By contributing documentation back, the community can learn from each other and build up a much more extensive knowledge base.

VOLTTRON™ documentation utilizes ReadTheDocs: http://volttron.readthedocs.io/en/develop/ and is built using the Sphinx Python library with static content in Restructured Text.

Building the Documentation

Static documentation can be found in the docs/source directory. Edit or create new .rst files to add new content using the Restructured Text format. To see the results of your changes. the documentation can be built locally through the command line using the following instructions.

If you’ve already bootstrapped VOLTTRON™, do the following while activated. If not, this will also pull down the necessary VOLTTRON™ libraries.

python bootstrap.py --documentation
cd docs
make html

Then, open your browser to the created local files:

file:///home/<USER>/git/volttron/docs/build/html/overview/index.html

When complete, changes can be contributed back using the same process as code contributions by creating a pull request. When the changes are accepted and merged, they will be reflected in the ReadTheDocs site.