Welcome to the Viam Documentation

Note Looking to contribute? Check out the Contributor Guide.

Build the docs locally

To be able to build the docs locally, you need to install the following:

• npm
• Hugo
  • macOS/Linux: brew install hugo
  • Windows: https://gohugo.io/getting-started/installing/

You can build the docs for local development using the following command:

make serve-dev-draft

If you would like to see the production view (without drafts and with minified CSS), run:

make serve-prod

You can also run hugo serve after installing Hugo to show the production view.

Generate HTML docs

To generate the full HTML version of the docs run:

make build-prod

You can serve the resulting docs with:

python3 -m http.server 9000 --directory public

Test the docs locally

To ensure your markdown is properly formatted, run make markdowntest.

To check for broken links run make htmltest.

Publishing

The docs are automatically published when a PR merges.

Hugo Quickstart

We write our docs in Markdown. If you haven't used Markdown before, have a look at this cheat sheet or look at some of the other docs in the docs folder for examples.

Front Matter

Each file that generates a page in Hugo starts with front matter that looks like this:

---
title: "Build a line-following robot with only a rover and a webcam"
linkTitle: "Line Follower"
weight: 90
type: "docs"
description: "Instructions for building a line-following robot that uses a webcam to track lines."
# SME: "SME Name"
---

• The description gets used for previews.
• The weight determines the ordering of pages in the side navigation bar.

Prod/Draft/Future Pages

Add draft: true to the Front Matter to set a page to Draft. You can commit and push the page and it won’t display in production. Add future: true to the Front Matter to begin building a page to production on a certain date (for example, a release date).

Links

When linking to an image or another page in markdown, it's best to use a relative link. For example, if you were writing in viam/high-level-overview.md, Hugo sees this as a directory on the site of docs.viam.com/viam/.

• To link to another markdown file in the same directory as the markdown file, use [mylink](../installation/). Note the trailing slash as another markdown file is another web directory in Hugo
• To link to some image in the same directory as the markdown file, use [mylink](../image1.png).
• To link something in a different directory, use [mylink](/components/)

We are also using htmltest to ensure links within the docs work. To test locally, install htmltest.

Shortcodes

We have a number of special shortcodes that use HTML templates.

This is how you use them:

Tabs:

{{< tabs name="Example tabs">}}
{{% tab name="Tab 1"%}}

This will be inside Tab 1.

{{% /tab %}}
{{% tab name="Tab 2"%}}

This will be inside Tab 2.

{{% /tab %}}
{{< /tabs >}}

Alerts:

{{< alert title="Tip" color="tip" >}}
A helpful tip
{{< /alert >}}

Expanders:

{{%expand "Click this to see what's inside" %}}
This will be visible if the reader clicks on the expander
{{% /expand%}}

Footnotes

To add a footnote:

"Some completely[^f] random text."

[^f]: this is the text for the footnote

You can place the footnote text immediately beneath the paragraph where you put the marker. Hugo will place it at the bottom of the page.