How is the RailsGuides website updated?

rubyonrails-docs
1

Hey everybody,

I want to contribute to docrails, but I'm not sure which areas/aspects are in greatest need. Today, when I noticed an error on the website, I checked the github repo, and I saw that it had already been corrected weeks ago. Perhaps a later commit put the error back in the doc? Is the RailsGuides website about to be updated? Is there anything I (or we) can do to speed this up?

Thanks,

Gabe

2

The Rails documentation comes in two sets: guides for learning, and API for reference.

They are part of Rails. When a new stable version of Rails is out, an automated job generates the documentation that comes with that release, and publishes it.

On the other hand, every push to master triggers edge docs regeneration, you can check the edge docs in

    http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org

and

    http://edgeapi.rubyonrails.org

docrails is cross-merged with master typically once or twice a week. Contributions to docrails get published to the edge docs when they are merged into master (and the merge pushed).

Occasionally some doc fix may be worth being backported to stable branches, especially if it corrects a factual error. In such a case I'd appreciate very much if you can bring the patch to my attention somehow.

3

Thanks for explaining how the docs publishing works. I never new “edge guides” existed until now. Cool stuff.

The error I noticed was on the testing page of the normal (3.0.7) rails guide:

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/testing.html

Section 3.2 Running tests has a typo (error). Line 244 should read:

ruby -Itest test/unit/post_test.rb

According to this page’s history, however this was already corrected by github user rohit in September 2010:

https://github.com/lifo/docrails/commit/3683745cbc94a60e1cf60d86c9cb62f067182de3#railties/guides/source/testing.textile

If you believe the regular 3.0.7 guides need more proof-reading, let me know. I’d be happy to help.

Gabe

4

Thanks for explaining how the docs publishing works. I never new "edge guides" existed until now. Cool stuff. The error I noticed was on the testing page of the normal (3.0.7) rails guide: Testing Rails Applications — Ruby on Rails Guides Section 3.2 Running tests has a typo (error). Line 244 should read: ruby -Itest test/unit/post_test.rb According to this page's history, however this was already corrected by github user rohit in September 2010: https://github.com/lifo/docrails/commit/3683745cbc94a60e1cf60d86c9cb62f067182de3#railties/guides/source/testing.textile

Excellent, I've just pushed that one to 3-0-stable.

If you believe the regular 3.0.7 guides need more proof-reading, let me know. I'd be happy to help.

3.1 is around the corner, I cherry-picked a lot into 3-0-stable after Rails 3 was released, but after some time it was too time consuming because conflicts happened too often. After that point only really important fixes are worth being cherry-picked, in the line of the branch itself, which is maintenance. The bulk of the work in docrails is going to be out with 3.1.

5

Hi,

What happened to https://github.com/lifo/docrails/issues? It's referenced in the guides a lot:

    Issues may also be reported in Github.

6

It was removed, updated guides will be out soon with 3.1.

Reason is docrails is not really a project, but just a branch of Rails with some special rules.

The idea is that documentation, as testing, is an integral part of Ruby on Rails itself. So, documentation issues are Rails issues. They should be reported there.