| Site | Status |------|------- | istio.io | | preliminary.istio.io | | archive.istio.io |

istio.io

This repository contains the source code for istio.io and preliminary.istio.io.

Please see the main Istio README file to learn about the overall Istio project and how to get in touch with us. To learn how you can contribute to any of the Istio components, please see the Istio contribution guidelines.

• Editing and building
• Versions and releases
  • How versioning works
  • Publishing content immediately
  • Creating a major/minor release
  • Creating a patch release
• Testing document content
• Multi-language support
• Regular maintenance

Editing and building

To learn how to edit and build this repo's content, please refer to Creating and Editing Pages.

Versions and releases

Istio maintains two variations of its public site.

• istio.io is the main site, showing documentation for the current release of the product. istio.io/archive contains snapshots of the documentation for previous releases of the product. This is useful for customers still using these older releases.

• preliminary.istio.io contains the actively updated documentation for the next release of the product.

The user can trivially navigate between the different variations of the site using the gear menu in the top right of each page. Both sites are hosted on Netlify.

How versioning works

• Documentation changes are primarily committed to the master branch of istio.io. Changes committed to this branch are automatically reflected on preliminary.istio.io.

• The content of istio.io is taken from the latest release-XXX branch. The specific branch that is used is determined by the istio.io Netlify project's configuration.

Publishing content immediately

Checking in updates to the master branch will automatically update preliminary.istio.io, and will only be reflected on istio.io the next time a release is created, which can be several weeks in the future. If you'd like some changes to be immediately reflected on istio.io, you need to check your changes both to the master branch and to the current release branch (named

release-.

release-1.7

This process can be taken care of automatically by our infrastructure. If you submit a PR to the master branch and annotate the PR with the

cherrypick/release-.

Creating a major/minor release

Here are the steps necessary to create a new documentation version. Let's assume the current version of Istio is 1.6 and you wish to introduce 1.7 which has been under development.

When Istio source code is branched

Run

make prepare-1.7.0

content/en/docs/reference

Approaching the day of the release

1. For a dry run before official release, run

   make release-1.7.0-dry-run

   , which will only create a new branch

   release-1.7-dry-run

   and not touch any other branches.

2. On the day of release, run

   make release-1.7.0

   . This make target will change some variables in

   master

   and

   release-1.6

   , and create a new branch

   release-1.7

   for the new version.

3. Go to the istio.io project on Netlify and do the following:

- Change the branch that is built from the previous release's branch to the new release branch, in this case `release-1.7` (or `release-1.7-dry-run` as appropriate).


Select the option to trigger an immediate rebuild and redeployment.

Once deployment is done, browse istio.io and make sure everything looks good.

1. Go to the Google Custom Search Engine and do the following:

- Download the istio.io CSE context file from the Advanced tab.

Add a new FacetItem at the top of the file containing the previous release's version number. In
this case, this would be V1.6.

Upload the updated CSE context file to the site.

In the Setup section, add a new site that covers the previous release's archive directory. In this
case, the site URL would be istio.io/v1.6/*. Set the label of this site to the name of the
facet item created above (V1.6 in this case).

Creating a patch release

A few days before the patch release, the release managers should notify the Doc WG that the release is built and is starting it's long running qualification test. At this time, move the doc automation tests to use the new release to verify automated doc testing passes.

To move to a new release (make sure you are in the patch's release branch):

1. Run

   go get istio.io/[email protected] && go mod tidy

   .

2. Create a PR with the

   go.*

   changes.

Creating a new patch release involves modifying a few files:

1. Edit

   data/args.yml

   and change the

   full_version

   field to

   "A.X.Y"

   . This is only needed for a patch of the

   current

   release.

2. Complete the release note for the release by editing the markdown file

   content/en/news/releases/A.X.x/announcing-A.X.Y/index.md

   . This is where you describe the changes in the release. Please look at other existing files for example content and layout.

3. Run

   make update_ref_docs

   to get the latest reference docs. Normally, this is only needed for a patch of the

   current

   release. If needed in an earlier release, see Updating an archive.

Updating an archive

If the archived version in a newer branch (e.g.,

release-1.7:archive/v1.6

release-1.6

make build-old-archive-1.6.0

master

release-1.6

master

current

Updating the test reference for a given release stream

The release streams starting with

release-1.6

1.x.y

There are two types of builds,

public

private

public

Private

private

public

public

For public builds: 1. Get the istio/istio commit that was used for the build from https://gcsweb.istio.io/gcs/istio-release/releases/1.x.y/manifest.yaml file. 1. In the release branch: Run

go get istio.io/[email protected] && go mod tidy

For private builds (this is done after the build is released): 1. In the release branch: Run

go get istio.io/[email protected] && go mod tidy

For both builds, we want to verify that the HUB/TAG are correct in the Makefile.core.mk (they change depending on if using the private or public builds). Look for the section similar to: ```

If one needs to test before a docker.io build is available (using a public test build),

the export HUB and TAG can be commented out, and the initial HUB un-commented

HUB ?= gcr.io/istio-testing

export HUB ?= docker.io/istio

export TAG ?= 1.7.3

For public builds, the `export HUB/TAG`s would be uncommented and have correct values. For private builds,
or the `master` branch, the HUB would be uncommented.

Finally, create and submit a PR with the changes and one can see the test results in the PR. Normally,
the PR won't actually merge until the release is released (sometimes there are multiple builds for a
release).
Testing document content
Many documents on the Istio site demonstrate features using commands that may or may not continue to work as
Istio evolves from release to release. To ensure the documented instructions stay up to date with as little
continuous manual testing as possible, we have created a framework to automate the testing of these documents.
Every page on istio.io that can be tested includes a PAGE TEST indication under
the page title. For example:


A green checkmark indicates an automated test is available for the page. The page is up to date and working as
documented.
A grey X, on the other hand, means that there is no automated test available for the page, yet.
We'd appreciate it if you'd like to help create one! Our goal is to eventually have an automated test in place
for every testable document published on the Istio site.
See the tests README for more information.
Multi-language support
The site is translated into multiple languages. Source of truth is the English content, while other languages are
derived and so tend to lag behind slightly. Each site language gets its own fully self-contained content directory
and translation table file. Languages are identified using their international 2-letter language code. The main
site content is located in content/<language code> (e.g. content/en), and the translation table is a TOML-format
file in i18n\<language code>.toml (e.g. i18n/en.toml).
Getting started with translation is fairly simple:

Create a full copy of the content/en directory for your language. For example, you'd copy content/en to content/fr if you
were doing a French translation.

Update all the links in your new content directory to point to your content directory instead of to the English content.
For example, if you were doing a French translation you would change links such as [a doc](/docs/a/b/c) to
[a doc](/fr/docs/a/b/c).

Remove all the aliases directives in the front-matter of all content pages. Aliases are used when moving a page
to a new location, so they're not desirable for brand new content.

Create a copy of the i18n/en.toml file for your language. For example, you'd copy i18n/en.toml to i18n/fr.toml if you were doing
a French translation. This file contains the text that is displayed by the site infrastructure for things like menus, and other
standard material.

Edit the file config.toml to list your new language. Search for the [languages] entry and just add a new entry. This
tells the Hugo site generator to process your content.

Edit the file scripts/lint_site.sh and search for check_content. Add another call to check_content for your
new content directory. This ensures that the linting rules apply to your new content.

Edit the file src/ts/lang.ts and add your new language. This will add your language to the language toggle button that is
available on preliminary.istio.io and will make it so your language will be supported in the language selection menu.

Get an Istio GitHub administrator to create a new maintainer team for your language. For French, this would be
WG - Docs Mintainers/French.

Edit the file CODEOWNERS and add entries for your language to give the new team you've created ownership over
the translated content and translation table file.


You can then commit all of these changes and you can start translating the content and the translation file in a purely
incremental fashion. When you build the site, you'll find your content at <url>/<language code>. For example, once you've
checked everything in, you should be able to get to your content at https://preliminary.istio.io/fr if you were doing a
French translation.
Once your translation is complete and you're ready to publish it to the world, there are a few other changes you need to make:

Edit the file layouts/index.redir. Search for translated sites and add a line for your language. This will cause
users coming to the site for the first time to be automatically redirected to the translated content suitable for them.
For French, this would be:
/  /fr   302  Language=fr

Edit fhe file layouts/partials/headers.html. Search for switch-lang and you'll find the definitions for the language selection
menu. Add a line for your new language.


And that's it.
Regular maintenance
We have a number of checks in place to ensure a number of invariants are maintained in order to
help the site's overall quality. For example, we disallow checking in broken links and we do spell
checking. There are some things which are hard to systematically check through automation and instead
require a human to review on in a while to ensure everything's doing well.
It's a good idea to run through this list before every major release of the site:

Ensure that references to the Istio repos on GitHub don't hardcode branch names. Search for any uses of /release-1 or /master
throughout all the markdown files and replace those with {{< source_branch_name >}} instead, which produces a version-appropriate
branch name.

Review the .spelling file for words that shouldn't be in there. Type names in particular tend to creep in here. Type names should
not be in the dictionary and should instead be shown with backticks. Remove the entries from the dictionary and fix any spell
checking errors that emerge.

Ensure proper capitalization. Document titles need to be fully capitalized (e.g. "This is a Valid Title"),
while section headings should use first letter capitalization only (e.g. "This is a valid heading").

Ensure that preformatted text blocks that reference files from the Istio GitHub repos use the @@ syntax
to produce links to the content. See here
for context.