• Contributing to Documentation
• Running Locally
  • Build
  • Start
  • Publish
• Style and Configuration Guide
  • Formatting
  • Search Engine
  • Automation
    • Deployments
    • GitHub Actions
  • Conditional Rendering
  • Inline React Components
• Internationalization
• License

The Polkadot Wiki is the central source of truth for Polkadot. It is a community-focused initiative led by Web3 Foundation to keep an up-to-date resource on the best information for learning, building, or maintaining on Polkadot.

Contributing to Documentation

The Technical Education team at Web3 Foundation
are the primary maintainers of the Wiki and will review all issues and pull requests created on this
repository. If you notice typos or grammatical errors, please feel free to create pull requests with
these corrections directly. Larger contributions may start as issues to test the waters on the
subject with the maintainers. It is generally preferable to create a pull request over an issue to
propose a change to the Wiki content.

✨ The Wiki belongs to the community, help generate its identity. ✨

📥 There will be an upcoming initiative that will promote and encourage contributions
towards Polkadot-based content and documentation. In the meantime, feel free to share any ideas or
feedback you may have for the Wiki by opening a
Feature Request issue.

Keep engaged by checking out these common
Polkadot ecosystem resources.

Running Locally

Both the Polkadot Wiki and the Kusama Guide are built from the source files in this repository.
After cloning the source locally, you can start the websites with each of these respective commands
(ensure you run yarn at the root of the repository first to install dependencies).

The Wiki uses Algolia search, which can be accessed locally by providing the correct App ID and API
key. The app_id and api_key environment variables are needed for the Wiki to be built
successfully. If you are an external contributor, set the variables with some values like shown
below, which lets the Wiki repo build successfully (but disables the search bar).

export app_id="xxxxxx" api_key="xxxxxxx"

Using yarn, run:

yarn install

Build

🐦 Building the Kusama Guide:

yarn kusama:build

🟣 Building the Polkadot Wiki:

yarn polkadot:build

Start

🐦 Starting the Kusama Guide:

yarn kusama:start

🟣 Starting the Polkadot Wiki:

yarn polkadot:start

Publish

🐦 Publishing the Kusama Guide:

yarn kusama:publish-gh-pages

🟣 Publishing the Polkadot Wiki:

yarn polkadot:publish-gh-pages

Style and Configuration Guide

Use the style guide from the
Substrate Knowledge Base

Formatting

Prettier is automatically run when making a local commit. Verify that all changes render as expected
after making new commits by running the projects locally.

See the Conditional Rendering and
React Components sections for additional details regarding how to
properly format syntax for elements outside of the standard markdown library.

Search Engine

Algolia DocSearch is the search engine that is used, which is
built into Docusaurus. Indexing via Algolia provides faster lookup; the actual configuration for
lookup is located in another repository that Algolia DocSearch maintains.

We have enabled searching on the Wiki by declaring the algolia section in the siteConfig.js file
in scripts, and defining an API key and index name that are provided by DocSearch.

  algolia: {
    apiKey: "53c6a4ab0d77c0755375a971c9b7cc3d",
    indexName: "kusama_guide",
    algoliaOptions: {
      facetFilters: ["language:LANGUAGE"],
    }, // Optional, if provided by Algolia
  }

If you would like to access and modify this, you can re-submit the documentation url via
DocSearch Program, where they will send a JavaScript snippet
that you can re-integrate into the configuration, similar to the one shown above.

Automation

Deployments

The Polkadot Wiki is built on the gh-pages branch and automatically deployed to GitHub Pages. The
Kusama Wiki is also deployed to GitHub Pages (via a separate repository).

Development servers exist at https://staging.polkadot.network and
https://staging.kusama.network. The servers will reflect the latest master commit or PR put up
against the master branch by a member of the Technical Education team. A staging environment can be
generated to reflect a specific branch by invoking the workflow_dispatch command via the GitHub UI
and can then be reviewed by the team before proceeding to production. If all is well, the new
commits on master are transferred into the production branch,prod, by rebasing master on
prod. This is completed automatically every 24 hours or manually through a workflow_dispatch
command. After these jobs are completed, the CICD production workflow will automatically deploy
prod to the public sites: Polkadot Wiki and
Kusama Guide, respectively.

GitHub Actions

Conditional Rendering

The two Wikis support conditional rendering depending on which Wiki is being deployed. This is
useful for mirrored pages with most content in common but have minor differences. To use this
functionality, surround Kusama specific content with
{{ kusama: KUSAMA_SPECIFIC_CONTENT :kusama }}, and polkadot specific content with
{{ polkadot: POLKADOT_SPECIFIC_CONTENT :polkadot }}.

For example the syntax:

The {{ polkadot: Polkdadot Wiki :polkadot }} {{ kusama: Kusama Guide :kusama }} is a great resource!

Will render:

The Polkdadot Wiki is a great resource!

or

The Kusama Guide is a great resource!

depending on which project is currently loaded.

To verify the appropriate values have been substituted in each scenario, run polkadot:start and
kusama:start in separate terminals. If prompted with
[WARNING] Something is already running on port 3000. Would you like to run the app on another port instead?,
proceed with yes. This will likely launch one project on port 3000 and the other on 3001, allowing
you to compare the rendered outputs for both projects locally and simultaneously.

Inline React Components

Occasionally you may require additional functionality that is outside of the scope of basic
markdown. React components can be used inline in existing markdown documents as a solution, allowing
you to render custom elements. This is currently the strategy used to
retrieve live on-chain values
and display them directly in the docs without the need to recompile or even reload the web app using
RPCs.

If you are looking to invoke and embed data from 3rd party APIs or sources, checkout the
Http-Request-Sample component.
A full list of sample components can be found
here.

Try and reuse existing components as much as possible instead of creating new ones to keep the code
lean and comprehensive. It is also important to verify prettier has not modified the formatting of
your component after making a commit. Below are some best practices for achieving common formatting
that will not be modified by the prettier command:

Always wrap RPC components in conditional rendering & keep them on new lines:

{{ polkadot: <RPC network="polkadot" path="query.staking.validatorCount" defaultValue={297}/> :polkadot }}
{{ kusama: <RPC network="kusama" path="query.staking.validatorCount" defaultValue={297}/> :kusama }}

To add grammar without added spacing, place the grammar inside the conditional brackets:

The validator count followed by a period is
{{ polkadot: <RPC network="polkadot" path="query.staking.validatorCount" defaultValue={297}/>. :polkadot }}
{{ kusama: <RPC network="kusama" path="query.staking.validatorCount" defaultValue={297}/>. :kusama }}

The validator count in parentheses is
{{ polkadot: (<RPC network="polkadot" path="query.staking.validatorCount" defaultValue={297}/>) :polkadot }}
{{ kusama: (<RPC network="kusama" path="query.staking.validatorCount" defaultValue={297}/>) :kusama }}

Failing to follow this schema can results in unexpected formatting, such as added line-breaks or
spacing, especially after running prettier.

Internationalization

License

The Polkadot Wiki is licensed under the GPL-3.0 free software license.