This is a documentation repository for the department's playbook.
The Playbook is a public-facing guide to the fundamental ways we work. This sits alongside the internal-facing Knowledgebase, which contains specific details of how our technologies and toolkits are built and configured.
The Playbook is structured into sections to promote a clear and simple narrative to the reader.
Playbook settings, including look and feel, plugins etc, are defined in the mkdocs.yml at the root.
The Playbook documentation resides in the /docs folder. This includes markdown files and assets such as images or supporting documents. Additionally styling overrides are included in CSS files in the ../../stylesheets folder, and the .pages file outlines the navigation structure.
This Playbook is written using Markdown, a simple text editor designed for documentation.
More specifically, it is built on MKDocs, using the Material for MKDocs theme. MKDocs and Material for MKDocs extend the functionality of Markdown, allowing you to include visually richer content.
It is stored and version controlled using Git in GitHub, and published with using GitHUb actions into an Azure WebApp.
A full guide on how to contribute to the Playbook can be found in the Knowledgebase
You can make small changes within GitHub, and will be able to view basic markdown rendering when you do. This will include all of MKDocs or Material for MKDocs rendering.
Whilst this can be useful for basic content updates (e.g. single paragraph updates), it is critical when making larger or more complex changes (e.g. multiple page changes, styling or configuration updates) that you are able to properly validate your work before you create a pull request.
!!! note "Ownership"
When you create, review, or modify a document, **you are responsible** for ensuring that it is _well written_ and has been _peer reviewed_, and that _review date is set_.
To achieve this you will need to clone the repository and run Playbook on your local machine.
Running locally requires the following tooling to be installed and available:
To install pip, ensure that Python has been installed and then run python -m ensurepip
. This will ensure pip is installed and available.
To run the playbook via Visual Studio Code, simply hit the <F5>
key. VSCode will ensure all plugins are installed, and start a local instance of MKdocs.
You should then be able to open a browser window at http://localhost:8000/ to view the locally running version of the playbook.
To stop it again, simply select the VSCode window, and press <Shift>+<F5>
.
!!! note These keystrokes map to the Start Debugging and Stop Debugging commands from the Run menu.