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Contributing

We value your documentation contributions, and we want to make it as easy as possible to work in this repository. One of the first things to decide is which branch to base your work on. If you get confused, just ask and we will help. If a reviewer realizes you have based your work on the wrong branch, we'll let you know so that you can rebase it.

Note: To contribute code to Docker projects, see the Contribution guidelines.

Files not edited here

Files and directories listed in the path: keys in .NOT_EDITED_HERE.yaml are maintained in other repositories and should not be edited in this one. Pull requests against these files will be rejected. Make your edits to the files in the repository and path in the source: key in the YAML file.

Quickstart

If you spot a problem while reading the documentation and want to try to fix it yourself, click the Edit this page link at the bottom of that page. The page will open in the Github editor, which means you don't need to know a lot about Git, or even about Markdown.

When you save, you will be prompted to create a fork if you don't already have one, and to create a branch in your fork and submit the pull request. We hope you give it a try!

Overall doc improvements

Most commits will be made against the master branch. This include:

  • Conceptual and task-based information not specific to new features
  • Restructuring / rewriting
  • Doc bug fixing
  • Typos and grammar errors

One quirk of this project is that the master branch is where the live docs are published from, so upcoming features can't be documented there. See Specific new features for a project for how to document upcoming features. These feature branches will be periodically merged with master, so don't worry about fixing typos and documentation bugs there.

Do you enjoy creating graphics? Good graphics are key to great documentation, and we especially value contributions in this area.

Specific new features for a project

Our docs cover many projects which release at different times. If, and only if, your pull request relates to a currently unreleased feature of a project, base your work on that project's vnext branch. These branches were created by cloning master and then importing a project's master branch's docs into it (at the time of the migration), in a way that preserved the commit history. When a project has a release, its vnext branch will be merged into master and your work will be visible on https://docs.docker.com/.

The following vnext branches currently exist:

Collaborate on a pull request

Unless the PR author specifically disables it, you can push commits into another contributor's PR. You can do it from the command line by adding and fetching their remote, checking out their branch, and adding commits to it. Even easier, you can add commits from the Github web UI, by clicking the pencil icon for a given file in the Files view.

If a PR consists of multiple small addendum commits on top of a more significant one, the commit will usually be "squash-merged", so that only one commit is merged in. On occasion this is not appropriate and all commits will be kept separate when merging.

Pull request guidelines

Help us review your PRs more quickly by following these guidelines.

  • Try not to touch a large number of files in a single PR if possible.

  • Don't change whitespace or line wrapping in parts of a file you are not editing for other reasons. Make sure your text editor is not configured to automatically reformat the whole file when saving.

  • A Netlify test runs for each PR that is against one of our long-lived branches like master and the vnext branches, and deploys the result of your PR to a staging site. The URL will be available at the bottom of the PR in the Conversation view. Check the staging site for problems and fix them if necessary. Reviewers will check the staging site too.

If you can think of other ways we could streamline the review process, let us know.

Style guide

If you have questions about how to write for Docker's documentation, have a look at the style guide. The style guide provides guidance about grammar, syntax, formatting, styling, language, or tone. If something isn't clear in the guide, submit an issue to let us know or submit a pull request to help us improve it.