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Introducing the new Opscode Documentation site

Introducing docs.opscode.com!

We have created a new documentation website, which will become the new home for all of the documentation about Chef. The initial effort has focused around migrating the most accessed and valuable sections first. The next phases will involve improving on what is there and adding more content around installation, and other scenario-focused sets of content. We will be re-writing the “getting started” section so that it provides a greater amount of value, faster and easier than ever before. We will be versioning the new documentation based on Chef versions, so that you are always accessing the documents that are specific to you.

These topics are authored using Sphinx and are stored in a github repo called chef-docs https://github.com/opscode/chef-docs. We are currently building all of the documentation at http://docs.opscode.com/ and http://docs.opscode.com/chef/ from this repository on a daily basis.

There is also a Knife Quick Reference in the quick-reference repository (https://github.com/opscode/quick-reference) in which you can find PNG files that can be printed out to provide a front/back quick reference of the various Knife sub-commands. Print this out and give it to your friends and relatives this holiday season!

Why Sphinx?

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It’s restructured text (reST), which is a solid, well-structured authoring format that plays nice with several outputs, including HTML, PDF, and man page. Three things that Chef users need. The topics published at http://docs.opscode.com are using a custom Sphinx theme called “opscode”, which is located in the source under _themes/opscode.

How can I contribute?

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For starters, fork the repository if you want to author documentation for either your own purposes or for later inclusion into Chef documentation. Use github to submit pull requests. Use the [email protected] alias to submit feedback (which is always much appreciated), submit ideas for ways to improve the docs, or to discuss logistics, how the chef-docs repository is organized, and so on.

What has been moved over?

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What has been moved over? All of the documentation for Knife, Resources and Providers, Chef Essentials, APIs, configuration files, and several other topic areas. Some of the most important include:

An Overview of Chef

About Knife

Knife Command Line Reference

About Chef Resources

Resources and Providers Reference

Lightweight Resources Reference

Chef Configuration Files

What will happen to the wiki?

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At the top of topics that have migrated, a box has been added with pointers to the new topics at http://docs.opscode.com. Some of the legacy wiki topics will be deprecated, but there are large sections of the wiki being used by the Chef community that don’t have anything to do with “official” documentation about Chef, so the wiki will live on and continue being a useful tool for the Chef community.

Is there a style guide?

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Yes. Look in the chef-docs repository and find the folder called style_guide. Build it in your favorite Sphinx format.

Pauly Comtois