docs-onboarding/documentation-guidelines.md

# Documentation Guidelines

Best practices and guidelines for writing code documentation.

## Formats

All documentation should be easy maintain and accessible. Easy formats should be preffered over more complex ones.

## Release Notes

The idea is to get rather automated release notes. To have this as easy as possible, we need:

- key words for the kind of change we applied:
  - `new:` - for newly added functionality
  - `update:` - for updated functionality
  - `fix:` - for fixed functionality
  - `delete:` - for removed functionality
  - Everything else will be ignored

- tags for each version, we will output only the change log from the last and second last tag
  - you can add tags with `git tag -a <tag> -m "<message>"`

[resources/scripts/release-notes.bash](resources/scripts/release-notes.bash) is an example bash script to generate the release notes. You can run it with the following command:

```bash
bash resources/scripts/release-notes.bash
```

## PlantUML

Create png images from PlantUML files using the following command:

```bash
plantuml -tpng <file>.puml
```

## Draw.io Diagrams

Ensure to have the draw.io application aliased. This example is for a macOS based system configured with ansible:

```yaml
- name: Add Draw.io alias to .zshrc
  lineinfile:
    path: "/Users/{{ macos_user }}/.zshrc"
    line: "alias drawio='/Applications/draw.io.app/Contents/MacOS/draw.io'"
    state: present
```

Create png images from Draw.io diagrams using the following command.

```bash
drawio -x -f png -b 10 -o <output>.png <file>.drawio
```