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I looked at the man pages and found that while they are consistent in their basic concept, many things concerning formatting are not. For example, it is not consistent that options are behind an H4 header. The biggest criticism, however, is how commands and options are handled when referencing them in a text. There is no clear structure between the man pages regarding this. Sometimes backticks are used and sometimes they are written in italic. Also, the formatting regarding the appearance of the commands is not consistent either. I would like to propose a uniform formatting and, if accepted, apply it to all man pages. Uniformity is very important to me and it should be clear to the user when reading several man pages what exactly their content and references are about. Signed-off-by: Alexander Richter <67486332+Procyhon@users.noreply.github.com>
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Podman Documentation
The online man pages and other documents regarding Podman can be found at Read The Docs. The man pages can be found under the Commands link on that page.
Build the Docs
Directory Structure
| Directory | |
|---|---|
| Markdown source for man pages | docs/source/markdown/ |
| man pages aliases as .so files | docs/source/markdown/links/ |
| restructured text for readthedocs.io | docs/rst/ |
| target for output | docs/build |
| man pages | docs/build/man |
| remote linux man pages | docs/build/remote/linux |
| remote darwin man pages | docs/build/remote/darwin |
| remote windows html pages | docs/build/remote/windows |
Support files
| docs/remote-docs.sh | Read the docs/source/markdown files and format for each platform |
| docs/links-to-html.lua | pandoc filter to do aliases for html files |
| docs/use-pagetitle.lua | pandoc filter to set html document title |
Manpage Syntax
The syntax for the formatting of all man pages can be found here.
API Reference
The latest online documentation is
automatically generated by two cooperating automation systems based on committed upstream
source code. Firstly, the Cirrus-CI docs task builds
pkg/api/swagger.yaml and uploads it to a public-facing location (Google Storage Bucket -
an online service for storing unstructured data). Second, Read The Docs
reacts to the github.com repository change, building the content for the libpod documentation
site. This site includes for the API section,
some javascript which consumes the uploaded swagger.yaml file directly from the Google
Storage Bucket.
Since there are multiple systems and local cache is involved, it's possible that updates to documentation (especially the swagger/API docs) will lag by 10-or-so minutes. However, because the client (i.e. your web browser) is fetching content from multiple locations that do not share a common domain, accessing the API section may show a stack-trace similar to the following:
If reloading the page, or clearing your local cache does not fix the problem, it is
likely caused by broken metadata needed to protect clients from cross-site-scripting
style attacks. Please notify a maintainer
so they may investigate how/why the swagger.yaml file's CORS-metadata is
incorrect, or the file isn't accessible for some other reason.
Local Testing
Assuming that you have the dependencies installed, then also install (showing Fedora in the example):
# dnf install python3-sphinx python3-recommonmark
# pip install sphinx-markdown-tables
After that completes, cd to the docs directory in your Podman sandbox and then do make html.
You can then preview the html files in docs/build/html with:
python -m http.server 8000 --directory build/html