lsst-technote-bootstrap is a template for LSST technical notes that are written in reStructuredText, generated with Sphinx, and deployed to the web with LSST the Docs.

To create an LSST technote, use the @sqrbot command on Slack: https://developer.lsst.io/docs/technotes.html#create-a-restructuredtext-technote.

For background on the DM technote platform, see SQR-000.

This cookiecutter project should only be invoked manually for development. To create and publish a technote, follow the instructions linked above.

The following instructions are for template developers.

Install cookiecutter via:

pip install cookiecutter

Start a new technote project in a convenient directory. Run this command (verbatim):

cookiecutter https://github.com/lsst-sqre/lsst-technote-bootstrap.git

(Alternatively you can git clone this repository and run cookiecutter directly on it: cookiecutter lsst-technote-bootstrap).

Answer the prompts, and you'll have a brand new technote project. The prompts are documented below.

Note: If you're running cookiecutter with Python 3, you might get a RuntimeError:

RuntimeError: Click will abort further execution because Python 3 was configured to use ASCII as encoding for the environment.  Either run this under Python 2 or consult http://click.pocoo.org/python3/ for mitigation steps.

See Cookiecutter and Python 3 for a solution.

This section describes the content expected by the prompts when running cookiecutter to create a new technote project.

• first_author: The first author's name, formatted as "First Last". You can edit metadata.yaml to add additional authors.
• series: The technote series, which can be
  • SQR for SQuaRE technical notes
  • DMTN for Data Management technical notes
  • SMTN for Simulations Group technical notes
• serial_number: the serial number. Use three digits padded with zeros.
• title: Title of the technote.
• github_org: The GitHub organization where this technote resides, which can be
  • lsst-dm for the DM DMTN series
  • lsst-sqre for the SQuaRE SQR series
  • lsst-sims for the Simulations Group's SMTN series
• github_namespace: This is the expected GitHub URL of the technote, minus the 'github.com/' prefix. For example, lsst-sqre/sqr-000.
• docushare_url: The URL of the technote on Docushare, if the canonical version is stored there. If Docushare is not used, leave this field blank.
• description: This should be a short, 1-2 sentence description of the technote. This description is placed just below the title in the README.
• copyright_year: Should be the current year for new projects
• copyright_holder: Should your institution (For example Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. or University of Washington).

Note that errors when entering cookiecutter prompts can be easily fixed by editing the index.rst, README.rst and metadata.yaml files in the generated technote project.

Depending on how your shell is set up, you may get this error when running cookiecutter under Python 3:

RuntimeError: Click will abort further execution because Python 3 was configured to use ASCII as encoding for the environment.  Either run this under Python 2 or consult http://click.pocoo.org/python3/ for mitigation steps.

To solve this, you need to set your shell's locale to use UTF-8. Type these lines into your shell:

export LC_ALL=en_US.utf-8
export LANG=en_US.utf-8

This will work on macOS. Linux distributions may be different (try C.UTF-8).

After the locale is set, re-try the cookiecutter command.

Copyright 2015-2018 Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc.

lsst-technote-bootstrap is open source (MIT license).