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Contributing documentation to the AtoM project

Want to help us improve our documentation? All AtoM documentation is publicly available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported licence (CC BY SA). We rely on our community of users to help us keep our documentation clear, comprehensive, and easy to use - if you see something missing or broken, or have an idea about how to improve or expand upon our existing documentation, please consider getting involved. There are several ways you can help AtoM improve its documentation:

• Suggest minor fixes to Artefactual
• File an issue in our documentation repository
• Contribute documentation yourself via GitHub
• Contribute translations

Also, check out our Documentation contribution guidelines

Suggest minor fixes to Artefactual

See a typo or a broken link? Have a question or a minor suggestion? If you've noticed something that can be improved in our documentation, but don't have the time or resources to fix the problem yourself, we want to hear from you!

Contact us at: webmaster@accesstomemory.org

File an issue in our documentation repository

If you notice a problem in the documentation, start by filing an issue in the AtoM documentation repository with as much detail about the issue as possible. This is a good thing to do whether you're just reporting a typo, or about to submit a whole new section of documentation. Also, just because you file an issue doesn't mean you're committing yourself to addressing the requested fix yourself! We're happy to receive reports about how we can improve the AtoM docs.

You can find the issues by navigating to the GitHub repository, and clicking on the Issues tab. You can look at any existing issues here for reference, and open a new issue by clicking the green button on the right side of the page:

An image of the the issues in the AtoM documentation GitHub repository

Give your issue a descriptive title that gives us a sense at a glance what to expect. The body of the issue should mention, at a minimum:

• The page (and section, if possible) where the problem occurs
• The version of the documentation you are consulting
• A proposed solution

Here is an example issue requesting a minor fix in the Administrator's manual, that you can look at as a reference:

• https://github.com/artefactual/atom-docs/issues/48

Contribute documentation yourself via GitHub

Is there a section missing from our documentation that you'd like to see? Or a section that you'd like to improve by adding clearer instructions, more screenshots, or alternative workflows? Help us improve our documentation by submitting new or revised content yourself!

There are two main methods of contributing new documentation. For smaller changes, it's easier to make your edits via GitHub's user interface. If you a more technically proficient user and you're working on a bigger contribution or would like to be able to work locally in a text editor before contributing your changes, we also have instructions on how you can configure the AtoM Vagrant box for documentation contributions.

Useful reference resources

• Sphinx documentation website
• reStructured Text primer
• AtoM documentation contribution guidelines
• How to write a commit message
• GitHub Help pages

Jump to:

• Contributing documentation via GitHub
• Contributing documentation using Vagrant

Contributing documentation via GitHub

The following instructions will show you how to contribute changes to our documentation straight from our GitHub repository (here), using GitHub's user interface (GitHub Flow), which provides all the tools you need - including a text editor! If you are a more advanced user, you can do this from your own computer using a text editor and the command-line - see our instructions below for guidance.

An overview of the steps (described below):

• Find the document you want to edit (or the place to add a new one)
• Use GitHub's editor to make changes or additions
• Commit the changes
• Submit a pull request to Artefactual
• Dance! You've helped!

Find the document you want to edit

(Or the place to add a new one)

1. First, sign into your GitHub account at https://github.com (if you don't have an account yet, you'll need to create one first. You can do this on the same page.)

2. Navigate to Artefactual's AtoM Documentation repository: you can do this through the user interface by typing artefactual/atom-docs into the search bar at the top of the GitHub page.

3. GitHub's user interface provides a graphical file-explorer to help you navigate through the text files in our documentation repository. The AtoM documentation repository's files are organized into folders that mimic the structure of the user manual found on the home page - for example, all files that relate to the User Manual section called "Add/Edit Content" are grouped together in a file called "add-edit-content". In GitHub, click on a folder to view its contents. Click on a .txt file to open it in-page.

Tip

Can't find the right spot in GitHub?

Don't forget to check the "Branch" drop-down - atom-docs is organized into several different branches, with the About/Contribute and FAQ docs on a different branch than the User and Admin manuals. Additionally, as we create new versions of our documentation for each major release, we will create new branches (2.0, 2.1, 2.2, etc) - so make sure you are editing or adding to the correct branch! Ideally, you will add fixes to the most recent docs, so we can carry those improvements forward.

4. If you are adding a new page, navigate into the correct folder, and click the "Create new file" button at the top of the page.

5. If you are editing an existing page, navigate to the correct reStructuredText file, so that you can see its contents previewed on GitHub's interface. Then, click the "Edit" button (a pencil icon) found above the file preview:

6. GitHub will create a copy of the entire atom-docs repository in your chosen location (or in your own new repository if this is your first time using GitHub). Now you can edit to your heart's content without fear of breaking our production website or making the documents unavailable to other users. In git, this is known as "forking". At the top of the page, you'll see that now atom-docs is in your own repository (indicated by your chosen user name). You'll also see this message above the file editor, to remind you:

Use GitHub's editor to make changes or additions

7. When you click the "Edit" button above the text file preview, a copy of the atom-docs repository is made in your repository (associated with your GitHub account), and you'll be redirected to a web-based text editor, where you can make changes to the file via your web browser. If you are adding a new page, the text editor will be blank when it opens, and you can begin entering text. As you work, you can click on the "Preview changes" tab to see a rendered version

8. Make the changes you want to the file. When you are done, scroll to the bottom of the page - next we will commit the changes.

Commit the changes

9. When you are finished editing and/or adding files in the text editor, scroll to the bottom of the page. You will see a box with several text fields to fill in before submitting your changes.

• Commit Summary: This is a required field. GitHub Help describes a "commit" as such: "Think of a commit as a snapshot of your project – code, files, everything — at a particular point in time". Your commit summary is a concise way to summarize the changes to the project that users will find in the commit. Commit summaries should be 50 characters or less: this is more like a brief title so users can determine what has taken place at a glance. Keep it brief and to the point. Check out these guidelines in the Git documentation.

• Extended description: This is an optional field, which we at Artefactual recommend using if you plan on editing our documentation. This is your chance to explain at greater length what the changes you made were, and why you felt you should make them. A concise message here will help us understand your work, and allow us to merge it into our documentation more quickly! Remember, you want to explain WHAT you did, more than why or how.

10. Once you've added a commit summary (required) and an extended description (recommended), click the "Propose File Change" button. GitHub will branch your changes, and redirect you to a page where you can compare the changes to the original, as well as submit a "pull request" to the AtoM documentation repository.

Submit a pull request to Artefactual

11. Once you've finished your changes and clicked the "Propose File Change" button, GitHub will redirect you to a new page. On the bottom half of the page, you'll see a "diff" - a graphical representation of the changes you've made - the red fields with the - minus symbol in the sidebar indicate content that was changed/removed, while the green fields with the + plus symbol in the sidebar indicate the new content that was added. When you submit your changes to Artefactual, we'll be able to see this too - it offers us a quick way to understand where you've made changes, what was changed, and why.

12. At the top of the page, you'll see your commit summary and description, with a reminder above it from GitHub (in blue) that the changes are still only in your repository. To submit them to Artefactual for inclusion in the AtoM documentation, click the "Send pull request" button on the right- hand side of the page.

13. The page will reload with information about your pull request - you can see a summary of what you want to merge where at the top of the page (i.e. your patch or fix into one of our documentation branches). Your commit message and summary will be below - we'll see a similar message on our end when we receive the request.

14. Artefactual will receive your pull request, and one of our team members will review the changes. If there's a problem, we can send you a message via GitHub, or even begin a discussion right on the code! This way, if there's something we don't understand about the changes you've made, we can connect with you directly. This is very similar to the code review process we undertake on code submissions from developers - see our Code review wiki page for more information.

You'll be able to see a summary of our changes and the status of the review on your pull request. We'll add comments if we have changes to request.

15. If you need to make changes, you can simply return to the files and edit them in place. Follow the same steps as above. When you submit your commit, GitHub will give you the option to submit it as part of your pull request. You can also reply on the PR comments thread to ask for clarification or help, or to let us know that the requested changes have been implemented.

16. Once we've accepted the pull request and merged it into our repository, you'll get a notification (you'll probably get an email too, unless you've changed your default GitHub account settings). You'll be able to see the status of any changes right on the pull request.

17. Success! Your contributions have been accepted, and merged into the AtoM documents. You should be able to go to our website and see them in the documentation. Thanks for helping out! We'll also close the related issue.

18. Finished! You did it! Thank you for helping to improve the AtoM documentation! It's time to dance!

Contributing documentation using Vagrant

For more technically proficient users who intend to work on larger changes, and/or simply prefer being able to work in a local text editor, the following instructions will guide you through the process of configuring the AtoM Vagrant box so that you are able to create pull requests against the public AtoM documentation repository.

Jump to:

• Generate an SSH key and configure a forwarding agent
• Add your public key to GitHub
• Fork the AtoM documentation project
• Change the AtoM vagrant box to track your new fork
• Make changes and commit them to your fork

Generate an SSH key and configure a forwarding agent

We're going to creating a fork of the AtoM documentation repository into your GitHub account, and we want to be able to commit our local changes to your repository. To be able to do so remotely from the Vagrant command-line, we first need to create an SSH key and link it to your account, so you can authenticate and interact with your GitHub repositories remotely.

An SSH key pair can be generated on your local computer. For Mac and Linux users, we can use the built-in SSH agent functionality included with the O/S to manage this. For Windows, Microsoft does not currently include an SSH client by default, so we'll use a third-party tool for generating and managing our key, as well as connecting to the Artefactual Vagrant box environments.

SSH keys - Mac and Linux users

If you are using a Mac or a Linux based computer, here are instructions for generating a password protected key, and adding it to your keychain:

• Linux SSH instructions
• Mac SSH instructions

Keep a password-protected copy of your key somewhere secure on your local computer. Make sure the private key password is unique and secure!

SSH keys - Windows users

Because Microsoft does not include an SSH client by default with Windows, our Vagrant instructions recommend that Windows users use PuTTY to SSH into the Vagrant environment. PuTTY can be downloaded with a suite of other tools, which includes PuTTYgen, a tool to generate SSH key pairs, and Pageant, an SSH forwarding agent (similar to ssh-agent in Linux environments). Since we are going to use PuTTY for SSH, we can use PuTTYGen and Pageant to create and manage our keys as well.

You can download PuTTY, PuTTYgen, and Pageant here:

• https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html

Once you've downloaded and installed the utilities we are going to use PuTTYGen to generate our SSH key pair. To do so:

1. Launch PuTTYgen on your computer. 2. Configure the settings for your new SSH key. Let's use RSA, with 4096 bits:

An image of using PuTTYGen to create an SSH key

3. Once you've configured the settings, click "Generate" 4. PuTTYgen will ask you to move your mouse over the blank area of the dialog. This is used to generate randomness in how the cryptographic key is generated 5. When complete, you will be shown the public key, and given the option to save both the public and private keys:

An image of using PuTTYGen to create an SSH key

6. Make sure you save the private key! We recommend saving the public key as well for the next step (but if you don't there is a way we can use PuTTYgen to get it later). We also recommend following the naming conventions of keys generated in linux - call your public key id_rsa-pub and your private key id_rsa<c/ode>. PuTTYgen will save the key in a <code>.ppk format, which can be used by Pageant for SSH agent.

We're now ready to configure Pageant to manage our key and act as a forwarding agent!

Pageant is an SSH authentication agent designed for use with PuTTY. It holds your private keys in memory, already decoded, so that you can use them often without needing to type a passphrase.

Pageant documentation:

• http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.67/htmldoc/Chapter9.html#pageant
• See also this helpful Digital Ocean summary tutorial

Pageant can load your SSH key, and then pass it to PuTTY when authentication is requested. To enable this, you will need to change one setting on your saved AtoM Vagrant PuTTY configuration. To do so:

1. Open up PuTTY, and then click on your saved AtoM Vagrant profile. If you haven't created one yet, let's do so now:

• In the "Host name (or IP address)" field, enter the Vagrant box IP, which is 10.10.10.10
• Make sure the Port field is set to 22
• Give the session a name in the "Saved Sessions" field below - I've callled mine "AtoM Vagrant"
• Using the navigation menu on the left, go to Window > Translation, and make sure that the Remote character set is set to use UTF-8
• Click on "Session" at the top of the sidebar menu to return to the main page, and click "Save" to ensure these credentials are saved!

2. Now let's make sure that PuTTY can retrieve the key from Pageant. Using the sidebar menu again, navigate to Connection > SSH > Auth. Make sure the following options are checked:

• Attempt authentication using Pageant
• Allow agent forwarding

3. Leave any other boxes already checked/unchecked as you found them. Remember to click on the top menu item, "Session," to return to the main page, and then click Save!

Now Pageant will be able to pass your SSH key when required. See also:

• https://www.howtogeek.com/125364/how-to-ssh-hop-with-key-forwarding-from-windows/

4. Your process for starting up your Vagrant box and using Pageant to handle your SSH key will now look something like this:

• Launch Pageant
• Double-click the Pageant icon in your task bar to open it, and then click "Add"
• Pageant will open a file explorer. Navigate to your saved .ppk file - AKA your password-protected private key - and double-click to open it.
• If your key is password protected (as it should be!) then you will be prompted to enter your password now
• When successfully entered, you'll see a bunch of characters representing your key in Pageant's main window. You can now close this window - it will not close Pageant, but merely minimize it to the tray
• Launch the vagrant box via Windows cmd and PuTTY
• Once you have a password-protected key stored locally for use with Vagrant via Pageant, you can re-use the key for multiple boxes.

Add your public key to GitHub

Next we want to link your public key to your GitHub account, so that we can authenticate remotely using the private key that our SSH agent will forward whenever we submit commands to your remote repository.

Follow these instructions:

• https://help.github.com/en/articles/adding-a-new-ssh-key-to-your-github-account

Copying the public key - Mac and Linux

If you have generated your key in your host computer (e.g. your local laptop, rather than inside the vagrant box), then we can access your SSH key in your local .ssh directory.

Open a new terminal window - but do not SSH into the vagrant box. Instead, change into your home directory. Remember, you can use pwd to show your current directory, and cd to change directories - cd .. will move up one directory, etc. For more basic navigation tips, see our Command-line 101 slides.

Once in your home directory, run ls -al to see all hidden files. There should an .ssh hidden directory - let's change into it, and look around:

cd .ssh
ls -al

You should see something returned like the following, if your key is present:

drwx------   4 myusername  staff   128 10 Sep 09:49 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 20 myusername  staff   640  5 Sep 14:39 ..
-rw-------   1 myusername  staff  3326 10 Sep 09:49 id_rsa
-rw-r--r--   1 myusername  staff   749 10 Sep 09:49 id_rsa.pub

Note the 2 id_rsa files. The first one is your private key, which should be password protected. The second is your corresponding public key. This is what we will need to add to GitHub, and what we should copy. Let's access the contents of the file now, using the nano CLI text editor:

sudo nano id_rsa.pub

The text editor should show you something that looks a bit like this:

ssh-rsa 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 youremail@example.com

Copy this text, and continue following the GitHub instructions for adding an SSH key to your account.

Copying the public key - Windows users

If, when generating your key with PuTTYgen, you saved a local copy of your public key, then you should be able to open this with a text editor (such as atom.io, Sublime Text, Notepad++, etc.) It should look something like this:

An image of a public SSH key shown in a text editor

Note that the part we want to copy is the hash code in the middle - we don't need the header/footer.

If you didn't make a local copy of your public key, that's okay! PuTTYgen allows you to load an existing private key file into memory. If you do this, you can then change the passphrase and comment before saving it again; you can also make extra copies of the public key.

To load an existing key in PuTTYgen, launch PuTTYgen and then press the "Load" button. PuTTYgen will put up a dialog box where you can browse around the file system and find your private key file. Once you select the file, PuTTYgen will ask you for a passphrase (if necessary) and will then display the key details in the same way as if it had just generated the key. You can now copy the public key from the box at the top of the dialogue, or save a local copy of your public key, and then open it in a text editor.

Copy this public key, and continue following the GitHub instructions for adding an SSH key to your account.

Fork the AtoM documentation project

We're almost ready to start doing work! Now, to be able to make local changes and then submit them as a pull request, we first need to create a fork of the AtoM documentation repository in your GitHub account. In the next step, we'll modify the AtoM Vagrant box to track your version of the docs instead of the public one, so we can make changes and then submit them later. To create the fork:

1. If you're not already logged in, then log into GitHub 2. Navigate to the AtoM documentation GitHub repository: https://github.com/artefactual/atom-docs 3. At the top of the page, you should see a "Fork" button on the right side. Click it!

An image of the Fork button on a GitHub repository page

This will create a new copy of the atom-docs repository in your personal code repository. This will be indicated at the top of the page:

An image of a forked version of the atom-docs repo as indicated in GitHub

Change the AtoM vagrant box to track your new fork

The last configuration step we need to take is to configure your global git identity in the Vagrant box, and set it up to track your fork, instead of the public atom-docs repository. First, start up Vagrant - remember to follow any instructions provided above to configure your SSH agent so it can forward your SSH key when needed!

Now we'll want to configure our git identity in the Vagrant box. You can set the username and email associated with your GitHub account using the following two commands (be sure to swap in your GitHub username and email in the placeholders!):

git config --global user.name "your-username"
git config --global user.email your-email@example.com

You can check that this was set correctly, along with other default settings, with the following command:

git config --list

There are other things you can configure if you want, such as your default terminal text editor and other preferences. For example, often the default text editor inside your command-line terminal is set to use vim, but the key combinations for getting out of vim can be very confusing, especially for non-technical users. Instead, we can use nano, which provides a list of navigation commands right at the bottom of the screen. If you want to set git to use nano as your default CLI text editor, use the following:

git config --global core.editor nano

For more information and other configuration options, see:

• https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-First-Time-Git-Setup

Finally, let's set the remote origin to track your new fork. To do this, we will need to URL of your forked atom-docs repository - we'll add .git to the end of this in the command. The following example uses the URL for GitHub user testy-mctest's fork - swap in yours:

git remote set-url origin https://github.com/testy-mctest/atom-docs.git
git fetch

We're ready to make changes!

Make changes and commit them to your fork

Questions?

If there's something that you're not clear about in these instructions, or you've run into an unexpected error, send us an email at webmaster@artefactual.com, or make a post in the AtoM User Forum!

Contribute documentation translations

Want to help us translate these docs into your language? We rely on our amazing community volunteers to help us make AtoM a truly international application. Currently we are using Transifex to help us manage our project translations.

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