Polkadot Wiki

The Polkadot Wiki is the central source of truth for Polkadot. It is a community-focused initiative led by Web3 Foundation to keep an up-to-date resource on the best information for learning, building, or maintaining on Polkadot.

Contributing to Documentation

The Wiki is an open source project and we will review all issues and pull-requests created in this repository. If you notice typos or grammatical errors, please feel free to create pull requests with these corrections directly. Larger contributions may start as issues to test the waters on the subject with the maintainers. It is generally preferable to create a pull request over an issue to propose a change to the Wiki content.

Running Locally

Both the Polkadot Wiki and the Kusama Guide are built from the source files in this repository. After cloning the source locally, you can start the websites with each of these respective commands (ensure you run yarn at the root of the repository first to install dependencies):

The site is built using Docusaurus: you may need to install Docusaurus before running the Wiki locally. Using yarn, run yarn upgrade @docusaurus/core@latest @docusaurus/preset-classic@latest.

Building

The Wiki is currently being deployed onto IPFS and will follow the same configuration to build the static files.

• Kusama Guide: yarn kusama:build
• Polkadot Wiki: yarn polkadot:build

Start

• For the Kusama Guide: yarn kusama:start
• For the Polkadot Wiki:: yarn polkadot:start

Running GitHub Pages

• Kusama Guide: yarn kusama:publish-gh-pages
• Polkadot Wiki: yarn polkadot:publish-gh-pages

Style Guide

Use the style guide from the Substrate Knowledge Base

Formatting

Use pretty-quick as a pre-commit formatting tool.

There is an automatic pretty-quick check that occurs pre-commit to format your changed/staged files.

To format markdown pages, run the following in the docs folder:

npx pretty-quick --staged

To run pretty on the whole project, npx pretty-quick.

Static Site Generator

The Wiki's latest version uses the Docusaurus static website generator to convert the Markdown docs into a documentation website.

Search Engine

Algolia DocSearch is the search engine that is used, which is built into Docusaurus. Indexing via Algolia provides faster lookup; the actual configuration for lookup is located in another repository that's maintained by Algolia DocSearch.

We have enabled searching on the Wiki by declaring the algolia section in the siteConfig.js file in scripts, and defining an API key and index name that are provided by DocSearch.

  algolia: {
    apiKey: "53c6a4ab0d77c0755375a971c9b7cc3d",
    indexName: "kusama_guide",
    algoliaOptions: {
      facetFilters: ["language:LANGUAGE"],
    }, // Optional, if provided by Algolia
  }

If you would like to access and modify this, you can re-submit the documentation url via DocSearch Program, where they will send a JavaScript snippet that you can re-integrate into the configuration, similar to the one shown above.

Automated Deployments

The Polkadot Wiki is built on the gh-pages branch and automatically deployed to GitHub Pages. The Kusama Wiki is also deployed to GitHub Pages (via a separate repository).

Development servers exist at https://staging.polkadot.network and https://staging.kusama.network. The servers will reflect the latest master commit or PR put up against the master branch by a member of the Technical Education team. The latest version of master is staged and checked by the team. If all is well, the new commits on master are transferred into the production branch,prod, by rebasing master on prod. The CICD production workflow will deploy prod to the public sites: Polkadot Wiki and Kusama Guide, respectively.

Mirror Pages

A limitation of Docusaurus is that pages can only be included in one sidebar at any given time. Thus, our Kusama section will either hijack some content it shares with the rest of the Wiki or lack that content.

To solve this, the repo mirrors some pages and includes them in additional sidebars. The scripts folder contains a mirror.js script that creates a copy of the pages to duplicate across sidebars. The new pages are prefixed with mirror and must first be declared in mirror.js, then added to the relevant sidebar section. To run the script:

yarn mirror

Note: This command runs when using polkadot:start or kusama:start development scripts, so you don't need to worry about running it manually if you start the development site with one of these commands.

Conditional Rendering

The two Wikis support conditional rendering depending on which Wiki is being deployed. This is useful for mirrored pages that have most content in common, but some minor differences. To use this functionality, surround Kusama specific content with {{ kusama: :kusama }}, and polkadot specific content with {{ polkadot: :polkadot }}. Example:

If the treasury ends a budget period without spending all of its funds, it suffers a burn of a
percentage of its funds -- thereby causing deflationary pressure.
{{ polkadot: This percentage is currently at 1%
on Polkadot. :polkadot }}{{ kusama: This percentage is currently 0.2% on Kusama, with the amount currently going to
[Society](https://guide.kusama.network/docs/en/maintain-guides-society-kusama) rather than being
burned. :kusama }}

To test the resolution, run polkadot:build and kusama:build, then polkadot:inject and kusama:inject, respectively. Inspect the built files in the corresponding build folder under website or kusama-guide.

Internationalization

We are using Crowdin to manage all different translations. You can go to the project page and select the language you would like to translate to start.
All translated content through Crowdin will regularly submit a pull request to this repository.

If you do not see the language you would like to translate, please let us know via Element.

License

The Polkadot Wiki is licensed under the GPL-3.0 free software license.