Usage

Introduction

docusaurus-terminology is a yarn package for creating a terminology structure in your docusaurus project. This plugin allows you to use terms in your pages, that 'stick out' of the surrounding text, where hovering over them makes a popup appear with a short explanation of the term, and clicking on the term navigates the user to the page that documents the concept.

Term in text example

You can also generate a glossary with the list of your terms.

How it works

This plugin, once it's installed in a docusaurus project, parses docs in two ways:

Parses all *.md(x) files under docs/ and replaces each pattern with an appropriate React component supporting a tooltip functionality (see below)
Generates a glossary page with all terms corresponding to the *.md(x) files under docs/terms/

Install

Prerequisites

In order to use this plugin, you will need:

Node.js version >= 10.15.1
Yarn version >= 1.5
Docusaurus v2 repository (tested against 2.0.0-alpha-65 and above)

Installation

To install the plugin to your docusaurus repository, use the command:

yarn add @docusaurus-terminology/parser @docusaurus-terminology/term

Then, you can add the plugin to docusaurus.config.js file of your repository:

module.exports = {
  // ...
  plugins: [
    '@docusaurus-terminology/parser'
  ]
}

Or, you can use it with extra options defined (with more examples in the next sections):

  plugins: [
    [
      "@docusaurus-terminology/parser",
      {
        //options
      }
    ]
  ]

Handling terms

Defining a term

This plugin assumes that you follow the structure, as explained below:

Each term should have its own .md(x) file, inside the ./docs/terms directory, and it needs to consist of the following structure:

---
id: term_name
title: Term page
hoverText: This hover text will appear in the documentation page that you reference this term
---

### Term explanation

content here

Pay attention to the hoverText attribute, as it's important to provide this attribute (along with the default docusaurus attributes), so the plugin can fetch the correct popup text to show when referencing a term.

Use patterns to reference a term

When writing docs inside docs/*.md(x) files, in order to refer to a term, you may use the following syntax:

%%term_text|term_name%%

where:

term_text: The terminology text you want it to be visible in the documentation page
term_name: The value of the id attribute, which resides in the header of the term file:
---
id: term_name
...
---

After successfully running the script, the above occurrence will be replaced by a reference (technically a React component), which will render term_text as a link to the corresponding term page, which is in turn generated from the term_name attribute; furthermore, hovering over term_text displays a term summary, as extracted from the corresponding term page.

Example usage

Say you want to reference a term that exists under the ./docs/terms/ directory, e.g. ./docs/terms/party.md. You can use the following syntax to reference this term in your documentation page:

Some content that wants to reference the %%Party|party%% term

When the script runs, this will be replaced as follows:

Some content that wants to reference the <Term reference="party" popup="Popup text">Party</Term> term

which supports the functionality explained above.

And finally, all you will see in your compiled documentation page, will be:

Some content that wants to reference the Party term

with the word Party containing the described functionality.

Parse and replace

When you are finished referencing terms and have written corresponding term pages, you can test this locally by running the following command:

yarn docusaurus parse

This will replace all %%term_text|term_name%% occurrences with the React component supporting the required functionality.

Glossary generation

If everything works well with the above procedure, you can then generate a glossary page, by running the following command:

yarn docusaurus glossary

This will generate a file in ./docs/glossary.md where every term that has been mentioned above, will be populated in the glossary.md page.

Dry run option

If you want to see the output of parse or glossary in your terminal without updating the files, run:

yarn docusaurus parse --dry-run

yarn docusaurus glossary --dry-run

respectively.

This will show what the output of the git diff command would have been, if the actual replacement had taken place.

When to generate the terminology docs

As the terminology plugin actually edits all markdown files, your Git repository will show changes in the git diff command. It is highly recommended to avoid committing the changes, as the plugin will no longer be able to detect patterns that have been altered.

Your best case scenario will be to use the scripts in a CI, just before building and deploying the documentation.

The following example of a Gitlab CI job shows how to perform these steps in the CI environment:

...

generate-docs:
    image: node:lts
    stage: build
    before_script:
        - yarn install
    script:
        - yarn docusaurus parse
        - yarn docusaurus glossary
        - yarn build

and then you can use the build directory to serve your documentation.

Configuration options

For using the plugin with the default options, you can provide just the plugin name in docusaurus.config.js file of your repository:

  plugins: [
    '@docusaurus-terminology/parser'
  ]

You can also use some of the following options specified by wrapping the name and an options object in an array inside your configuration:

Option	Description	Type	Default value
termsDir	the directory used to collect the term files	string	./docs/terms
glossaryFilepath	specify the directory and name of the glossary file	string	./docs/glossary.md
patternSeparator	the special character used to separate `term_text` and `term_name` in the replace pattern for parsing	string	\|
noParseFiles	array of files to be excluded from search/replace	array	[]
noGlossaryFiles	array of term files to not be listed on the glossary page	array	[]

IMPORTANT NOTE: All file paths need to be relative to the project's root directory. If you want to exclude a file, you should write ./docs/excude-me.md.

Example:

plugins: [
  [
    '@docusaurus-terminology/parser',
    {
      termsDir: './docs/terminology/',
      noParseFiles: ['./docs/terminology/agent.md', './docs/terminology/actor.md'],
      noGlossaryFiles: ['./docs/terminology/agent.md'],
    }
  ]
]

Introduction#

How it works#

Install#

Prerequisites#

Installation#

Handling terms#

Defining a term#

Use patterns to reference a term#

Example usage#

Parse and replace#

Glossary generation#

Dry run option#

When to generate the terminology docs#

Configuration options#