Polkadot Wiki

The Source of Truth for Polkadot

• Contributing to Documentation
• Running Locally
  • Build
  • Start
  • Publish
• Style and Configuration Guide
  • Formatting
  • Static Site Generator
  • Search Engine
  • Automated Deployments
  • Conditional Rendering
• Internationalization
• License

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The Polkadot Wiki is the central source of truth for Polkadot. It is a community-focused initiative led by Web3 Foundation to keep an up-to-date resource on the best information for learning, building, or maintaining on Polkadot.

Contributing to Documentation

The Technical Education team at Web3 Foundation are the primary maintainers of the Wiki and will review all issues and pull requests created in this repository. If you notice typos or grammatical errors, please feel free to create pull requests with these corrections directly. Larger contributions may start as issues to test the waters on the subject with the maintainers. It is generally preferable to create a pull request over an issue to propose a change to the Wiki content.

✨ The Wiki belongs to the community, help generate its identity. ✨

identity.mp4

📥 There will be an upcoming initiative that will promote and encourage contributions towards Polkadot-based content and documentation. In the meantime, feel free to share any ideas or feedback you may have for the Wiki by opening a Feature Request issue.

Keep engaged by checking out these common Polkadot ecosystem resources.

Running Locally

Both the Polkadot Wiki and the Kusama Guide are built from the source files in this repository. After cloning the source locally, you can start the websites with each of these respective commands (ensure you run yarn at the root of the repository first to install dependencies).

Using yarn, run:

yarn install

The site is built using Docusaurus: you may need to install Docusaurus before running the Wiki locally.

yarn upgrade @docusaurus/core@latest @docusaurus/preset-classic@latest

Build

The Wiki is currently in the process of being deployed onto IPFS and will follow the same configuration to build the static files.

🐦 Building the Kusama Guide:

yarn kusama:build

🟣 Building the Polkadot Wiki:

yarn polkadot:build

Start

🐦 Starting the Kusama Guide:

yarn kusama:start

🟣 Starting the Polkadot Wiki:

yarn polkadot:start

Test

✅❌ Running tests locally:

yarn polkadot:test

or

yarn kusama:test

There is no need to run both as the tests are unified. The tests will also automatically run on new pull requests to the master branch.

Publish

🐦 Publishing the Kusama Guide:

yarn kusama:publish-gh-pages

🟣 Publishing the Polkadot Wiki:

yarn polkadot:publish-gh-pages

Style and Configuration Guide

Use the style guide from the Substrate Knowledge Base

Formatting

Use pretty-quick as a pre-commit formatting tool.

There is an automatic pretty-quick check that occurs pre-commit to format your changed/staged files.

To format markdown pages, run the following in the docs folder:

# Run on entire project
npm pretty-quick
# Run only on staged changes
npx pretty-quick --staged
# Run only on local changes
npx pretty-quick --branch

Static Site Generator

The Wiki's latest version uses the Docusaurus static website generator to convert the Markdown docs into a documentation website.

Search Engine

Algolia DocSearch is the search engine that is used, which is built into Docusaurus. Indexing via Algolia provides faster lookup; the actual configuration for lookup is located in another repository that Algolia DocSearch maintains.

We have enabled searching on the Wiki by declaring the algolia section in the siteConfig.js file in scripts, and defining an API key and index name that are provided by DocSearch.

  algolia: {
    apiKey: "53c6a4ab0d77c0755375a971c9b7cc3d",
    indexName: "kusama_guide",
    algoliaOptions: {
      facetFilters: ["language:LANGUAGE"],
    }, // Optional, if provided by Algolia
  }

If you would like to access and modify this, you can re-submit the documentation url via DocSearch Program, where they will send a JavaScript snippet that you can re-integrate into the configuration, similar to the one shown above.

Automated Deployments

The Polkadot Wiki is built on the gh-pages branch and automatically deployed to GitHub Pages. The Kusama Wiki is also deployed to GitHub Pages (via a separate repository).

Development servers exist at https://staging.polkadot.network and https://staging.kusama.network. The servers will reflect the latest master commit or PR put up against the master branch by a member of the Technical Education team. The latest version of master is staged and checked by the team. If all is well, the new commits on master are transferred into the production branch,prod, by rebasing master on prod. The CICD production workflow will deploy prod to the public sites: Polkadot Wiki and Kusama Guide, respectively.

Conditional Rendering

The two Wikis support conditional rendering depending on which Wiki is being deployed. This is useful for mirrored pages with most content in common but have minor differences. To use this functionality, surround Kusama specific content with {{ kusama: :kusama }}, and polkadot specific content with {{ polkadot: :polkadot }}. Example:

If the treasury ends a budget period without spending all of its funds, it suffers a burn of a
percentage of its funds -- thereby causing deflationary pressure.
{{ polkadot: This percentage is currently at 1%
on Polkadot. :polkadot }}{{ kusama: This percentage is currently 0.2% on Kusama, with the amount currently
going to [Society](https://guide.kusama.network/docs/en/maintain-guides-society-kusama) rather than being
burned. :kusama }}

To verify the appropriate values have been substituted in each scenario, run polkadot:start and kusama:start in separate terminals. If prompted with [WARNING] Something is already running on port 3000. Would you like to run the app on another port instead?, proceed with yes. This will likely launch one project on port 3000 and the other on 3001, allowing you to compare the rendered outputs for both projects locally and simultaneously.

Inline React Components

Occasionally you may require additional functionality that is outside of the scope of basic markdown. React components can be used inline in existing markdown documents as a solution, allowing you to render custom elements. This is currently the strategy used to retrieve live on-chain values and display them directly in the docs without the need to recompile or even reload the web app using RPCs. Examples of existing React components used in this project can be found here. It is important to try and reuse existing components as much as possible instead of creating new ones to keep the code lean and comprehensive. If you are looking to invoke and embed data from 3rd party APIs or sources, checkout the Http-Request-Sample component.

Internationalization

❗ Currently the Wiki is being reorgnaized and updated. It is recommended to resume working on translations after the Wiki revamp is completed.

We are using Crowdin to manage all different translations. You can go to the project page and select the language you would like to translate to start.
All translated content through Crowdin will regularly submit a pull request to this repository.

If you do not see the language you would like to translate in, please let us know via Matrix.

License

The Polkadot Wiki is licensed under the GPL-3.0 free software license.