AssemblyLine Documentation

Read the documentation

What this is

This repository contains documentation for the Document Assembly Line Project run out of Suffolk LIT Lab.

This project created CourtFormsOnline.org.

The primary repository that this documents is docassemble-AssemblyLine.

Contributing to the documentation

This website is built using Docusaurus, a static website generator for documentation. Documentation is contained in a series of markdown files. The menu is contained in a file named sidebar.js.

If you want to contribute, please follow the LIT Lab style guide. When you submit a pull request with your changes, request a review from one or more LIT Lab staff members.

You will need to have a local copy of node.js and npm installed to edit the documentation.

Installing locally

Make a local clone of this repository, navigate to the repository in the terminal, and enter:

npm install

Run locally

npm run start

This command runs npm run build, then starts a local development server and opens up the documentation website in a browser window. Most changes are reflected live without having to refresh the page or restart the server.

Build

This command generates static content in the build directory that can be served using any static contents hosting service.

npm run build

Deploy

We use GitHub pages for deployment. Use the command below to deploy the repository to the gh-pages branch. It will then go live at asssemblyline.suffolklitlab.org.

GIT_USER=<Your GitHub username> USE_SSH=TRUE npm run deploy

Algolia search indexing

Merging a pull request into main runs the documentation deployment workflow, which pushes the built site to gh-pages. After GitHub's pages build and deployment workflow successfully publishes that branch, the Re-index Algolia search workflow requests a fresh crawl of the live site. Failed deployments and pull request test builds do not trigger a crawl.

Add these repository secrets under Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions:

Secret	Value
ALGOLIA_CRAWLER_ID	ID of the existing DocSearch crawler that writes to AssemblyLine_Documentation, available in the crawler's dashboard URL.
ALGOLIA_CRAWLER_USER_ID	Crawler user ID from the Algolia Crawler settings.
ALGOLIA_CRAWLER_API_KEY	Crawler API key from the same settings page.

These are Crawler API credentials, which are separate from the search-only API key in docusaurus.config.js. The account must have access to the Crawler API. The workflow uses the existing crawler's configuration and requests a crawl through the reindex endpoint. Indexing continues asynchronously after the workflow succeeds; monitor its progress in the Algolia crawler dashboard.

To request another crawl without deploying, run Re-index Algolia search from the GitHub Actions tab with main selected. If a required secret is missing, the indexing workflow fails with a setup message; the website deployment is unaffected.