Contributing to Datum

We use Astro to format and generate our website, and the Starlight theme for styling and site structure. Astro is an open-source static site generator that provides us with templates, content organization in a standard directory structure, and a website generation engine. You write the pages in Markdown, and Astro wraps them up into a website.

All submissions, including submissions by project members, require review. We use GitHub pull requests for this purpose. Consult GitHub Help for more information on using pull requests.

If you’ve just spotted something you’d like to change while using the docs, Starlight has a shortcut for you:

1. Click Edit page in the bottom left hand corner of the page.
2. If you don’t already have an up to date fork of the project repo, you are prompted to get one - click Fork this repository and propose changes or Update your Fork to get an up to date version of the project to edit. The appropriate page in your fork is displayed in edit mode.
3. Make your changes and send a pull request (PR).
4. If you’re not yet ready for a review, add “WIP” to the PR name to indicate it’s a work in progress. (Don’t add the Astro property “draft = true” to the page front matter, because that prevents the auto-deployment of the content preview described in the next point.)
5. Continue updating your doc and pushing your changes until you’re happy with the content.
6. When you’re ready for a review, add a comment to the PR, and remove any “WIP” markers.

If you want to run your own local Astro server to preview your changes as you work:

1. Follow the instructions in Getting started to install Astro and any other tools you need.
2. Fork the Datum Inc. Website repo repo into your own project, then create a local copy using git clone.
3. Follow the instructions at README. By default your site will be available at http://localhost:4321/. Now that you’re serving your site locally, Astro will watch for changes to the content and automatically refresh your site.
4. Continue with the usual GitHub workflow to edit files, commit them, push the changes up to your fork, and create a pull request.

If you’ve found a problem in the docs, but you’re not sure how to fix it yourself, please create an issue in the Datum Inc. Website repo.

• Starlight documentation
• Astro documentation
• Github Hello World!