Apptainer Admin Docs

This repository holds administrator documentation for the Apptainer container runtime.

This is a community project maintained as a sub-project by the Apptainer project, and contributions are always welcome! If you'd like to update or improve Apptainer's documentation please read the Apptainer CONTRIBUTING file, follow the instructions below, and submit a PR on GitHub.

This project uses reStructured Text (RST) and ReadTheDocs. As a library for the current theme, Sphinx Python library was used, using Python v. 3.6.

Setting up an environment to contribute

First things first, you will need to install the following tools:

• Install Python 3.6
• After that then you will need to install Sphinx:

pip install -U Sphinx sphinx-rtd-theme sphinx-copybutton

You're all set! after this you will only need to use your favorite editor for RST files.

How to do stuff in RST

First of all, it is good to have an idea of some files and their functionality in the project:

Structure of the project

This project maintains the following structure:

1. Index.rst : contains the sections and the initial table of contents tree, every section is referenced by a tag next to it. (e.g. Quick Start <quick_start>)
2. All other files, are named as the same reference tag described before, so in the previous example, a correspondent quick_start.rst file exists.
3. The configuration at the moment of compilation is given by the conf.py file, some more description about this file can be found below.

The conf.py file

This file contains the themes, extensions, variables and naming for files that the compilation process produces. Here are some important elements:

• version : Describes the current version (This one is a short version of the release)
• release: Describes the current release (Complete or full version description. For a matter of simplicity we maintain both at the same value)
• html_theme: Describes the theme to be used in the ReadtheDocs document.
• html_theme_options: Describes the options needed for configuration in the theme (This varies from theme to theme, so we enforce using the options for the Sphinx theme only.
• html_context: Options related to which is the github repository and what name it has.
• html_logo: The logo for the sidebar
• html_favicon: The favicon for the entire project
• htmlhelp_basename: Default name of the document generated in Latex, we leave all these as default values.

Cheatsheet to get started with reStructured (RST) Text

Some hints on how to write stuff on RST are described in this section.

1. Create a section/subsection/subsubsection title

Section titles are defined by surrounding or underlining them with different characters. Each combination of overline/underline and character used represents a different level section. We follow the conventions used by the python documentation for headers:

##################
H1: document title
##################

*********
Sample H2
*********

Sample H3
=========

Sample H4
---------

Sample H5
^^^^^^^^^

Sample H6
"""""""""

2. Reference sections

You might need to reference sections, for that aim you will need to first create the reference above the title you need to reference and second to reference it where you need the link reference. Remember that this type of references is very different than that of hyperlinks, because at the moment of compilation, the latex document generated will have the reference to the page in which that title was referenced. Very cool, huh? Let's see how it works...

Step 1: Create the reference

To create the reference on the section you need to link, you will need to specify a tag, allowed characters contain also - characters but they need to be unique name tags. So for example, in the build-docker-module section we can have something like:

.. _build-docker-module:

-------------------
build-docker-module
-------------------

Note that it might not be necessarily that the section is called just as the same as the tag-name.

Step 2: Reference it

You can do so by following the next syntax:

The name after the ref tag could also be different, the important thing is that the tag between the < and > is the one that belongs to the previous given tag name. Like in the following example:

:ref:`quickstart <quick-start>`

You can find a lot of information about RST on this site

Generating HTML files from RST

This is pretty straightforward by going to the root of the project on the command line and then do:

make html

This will generate a folder called _build within which you'll see a folder called html that contains all the html files you need.

Generating PDF files from RST

This is very similar to the previous step, you will need to execute on command line:

make latexpdf

With this, a new folder latex will be generated inside _build, that will contain all pdf files generated from RST (by default it is called "ReadTheDocsTemplate.pdf").

(Additional latex files are also generated if needed.)

Generating EPUB files from RST

Very similar to the previous command, you will just need to execute on a command line:

make epub

This will generate an epub folder inside _build. Inside epub, you will find files with an epub extension.