Contribute locally

Follow these steps to contribute to Elastic docs.

• Prerequisites
• Step 1: Install docs-builder
• Step 2: Clone a content repository
• Step 3: Serve the Documentation
• Step 4: Write docs!
• Step 5: Push your changes

To write and push updates to Elastic documentation, you need the following:

1. A code editor: we recommend Visual Studio Code
2. Git installed on your machine: learn how here
3. A GitHub account: sign up here

There are two different ways to install and run docs-builder:

1. Download, extract, and run the binary (recommended)
2. Clone the repository and build the binary from source

This guide uses option one. If you'd like to clone the repository and build from source, learn how in the project readme.

In this guide, we'll clone the docs-content repository. The docs-content repository is the home for narrative documentation at Elastic. Clone this repo to a directory of your choice:

git clone https://github.com/elastic/docs-content.git

1. Navigate to the docs-builder clone location:

   cd docs-content
   

2. Run the Binary:
   Run the binary with the serve command to build and serve the content set to http://localhost:3000. Specify the path to the docset.yml file that you want to build with -p.

   For example, if docs-builder and docs-content are in the same top-level directory, you would run:

   # macOS/Linux
   ./docs-builder serve -p ./migration-test
   
   # Windows
   .\docs-builder serve -p .\migration-test
   

Now you should be able to view the documentation locally by navigating to http://localhost:3000.

We write docs in markdown. See our syntax guide for the flavor of markdown that we support and all of our custom directives that enable you to add a little extra pizazz to your docs.

After you've made your changes locally,

• Push your commits
• Open a Pull Request

soon...