Practical Handbook Edits Examples

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Welcome to the Practical Handbook Edits Examples Page

This page contains video recordings and written tips for non-engineering team members on how to work Handbook-First. In these videos, we run through the GitLab Handbook with experts, uncovering how to best use the Handbook in our day-to-day work, and learning best-practices for Handbook editing along the way. This page is intended to be complementary to Using GitLab at GitLab, and we suggest you start there if you have not yet completed the GitLab 101 Tool Certification.

Have your own practical Handbook editing tips? Drop a video below!

Creating new handbook pages and multimedia embedding best-practices

Please note that the video mentions that you need to go to source/handbook to create a page which is no longer the case. The handbook is located under sites/handbook/source/handbook.

This video covers:

• Creating a new handbook page - @:37

• Embedding a video - @15:25, @18:53

• Making a URL open in a new tab - @17:05

• How this page got started - @22:48

Changing a page name and subsequent updates

This video covers:

• Renaming a URL - @1:05

• Redirecting from one URL to the other - @2:17

• Finding places where an old URL is linked and updating it to a new URL - @ 4:30

Creating mermaid diagrams

This video covers:

• Creating a mermaid diagram for the handbook:

  • Intro to a mermaid diagram

  • What they look like

  • Use cases for using them in the handbook

Creating issue templates

This video covers:

• Why you may want to use issue templates - @0:10

• What is an issue template and how to create one - @:54

• How issue templates and boards facilitate workflow management and automation - @3:55

Adding images to the handbook and handbook analytics

This video covers:

• How to see analytics on visits to a handbook page - @0:24

• When and how to add images to the handbook - @5:32

• How to keep up-to-date on changes in the handbook - @21:40

How to add a new directory and page to the handbook

This video covers:

• How to add a new page to your section of the handbook complete with a new main page and table of contents

More Tips

Pre-requisites

Some tips may require terminal shell access on macOS/Linux. Ensure that your environment is working and that you have cloned the www-gitlab-com project for example.

git clone https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com.git

Sync it. Ensure that you stash away local changed not yet committed.

cd www-gitlab-com
git stash
git checkout master
git pull

On macOS it is advised to use Homebrew and install the GNU tools. See this blogpost for a macOS setup.

Find files

One of the shell tools provided with macOS/Linux GNU is find. Open a terminal an run the following command in the main directory of the www-gitlab-com repository to get a list of all *.md files. This matches .md as suffix.

find . -type f -name '*.md'

Instead of the . you can also use a directory in the current path.

find source/handbook -type f -name '*.md'

The type f specifies files, d matches for directories. When not specified, all files and directories are taken into account.

You can replace -name with -regex to do more sensitive matching, for example to match all .md and .md.erb files.

find . -type f -regex '.*\.md[.erb]*'

This can be useful to check whether a blog post was merged to master:

git checkout master
git pull
find . -type f -name '*blogpost-filename*'

Find files and perform an action

This comes in handy when you want to print all matches with a prefix, or perform additional replace actions. The main principle is to follow the matching rules explained above, and add the -exec parameter.

The exec action should start a shell and execute a command in there. sh -c '' \; takes care of this for every file that matches. Imagine this as a loop of sequential steps to perform the action. The last missing bit is accessing the file in the current loop iteration. This is done via the {} marker inside the echo example printing the output.

Run the command in a terminal to see how it works:

find source/handbook/marketing -type f -name '*.md' -exec sh -c 'echo "Matched {}"' \;

Replace strings in a file

The GNU sed shell command is useful to replace a defined string in a file. The -i flag specifies to do that inline in the same file. The g flag defines a global match, replacing all pattern matches.

On macOS, ensure that the gnu-sed package is installed, and run gsed (instead of sed).

With using the / separator, it is necessary to escape all / characters in the string. You can avoid this by choosing another separator, for example ,:

Find and Replace a String in all (Matching) Files

Sometimes a project, URL target or Slack channel is being renamed. You can easily search and edit with the Web IDE on GitLab.com but for other files there is a quick and automated way required.

This method combines the find, exec and sed tips explained above. The exec action is now to use sed to perform an inline replacement of a pattern/string.

The following example is used in this MR for updating the Corporate Marketing project URL in all files.

git checkout master
git pull origin master

git checkout -b handbook/corp-mktg-project-url

find source/handbook -type f -exec sh -c 'gsed -i "s,https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/corporate-marketing,https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/corporate_marketing/corporate-marketing,g" "{}"' \;

git status
git diff

git commit -av -m "Handbook: Update corporate marketing project URL"

git push -u origin handbook/corp-mktg-project-url

To cut it down:

• Find and match all files in the source/handbook directory. The URL might be found in other files too.

• exec runs a sed/gsed action

• The replacement is https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/corporate-marketing with https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/corporate_marketing/corporate-marketing

• Verify the changes with git status and git diff before committing them

• Commit, push and create the MR from the URL