Contributing to Scala's OSS Ecosystem

Add New Guides/Tutorials

Language

    Why Contribute New Learning Material?

    As Heather Miller writes, contributing to docs.scala-lang.org is critical to making Scala accessible to newcomers, experienced programmers, and anyone who is curious. It is also a fantastic way to contribute for anyone who is comfortable using Scala, but maybe does not want to get involved with complex tools like the compiler.

    Architecture

    This documentation website is backed by an open-source GitHub repository, and is always contribution-ready.

    Content

    Currently, the types of documentation supported in this repository are:

    • Guides/Overviews/Books: Definitive guides/overviews of specific language features. Often long, detailed documents, often produced by members of the Scala team. An example is the Collections overview.
    • References: The canonical reference for language features, written by members of the Scala team. These provide the exact specification to understand more subtle aspects of the language. An example is the Scala 3 reference.
    • Tutorials: Bite-size, example-rich, and concise articles meant to get a developer up to speed quickly.
    • Cheatsheets: Quick reference of Scala syntax and behaviors.

    Implementation

    The website is statically generated from Markdown source using Jekyll, and hosted on GitHub Pages. This workflow was chosen to help contributors to focus on writing helpful content, rather than on configuration and boilerplate. It also aids publishing a static site in a central location.

    The Markdown syntax being used supports Maruku extensions, and has automatic syntax highlighting, without the need for any tags.

    Additionally, mdoc is used during pull requests to validate Scala code blocks. To use this feature you must use the backtick notation as documented by mdoc, see here for an example.

    Note: only validation of code is done by mdoc, and no extra output is generated.

    Submitting Docs

    To contribute a new document, you should first fork the repo, then write your article in Markdown (example below), and finally submit a pull request. Likely after some edits and discussion, your document will be made live on docs.scala-lang.org.

    ---
layout: singlepage-overview
title: My Awesome Title
---

## An h2 Header in Markdown

And a paragraph, with a [link](https://www3.scala-lang.org).

    Tables of contents will be automatically generated in a sidebar for your document, and syntax highlighting is provided.

    Criteria for Docs to be Accepted

    The goal of this documentation repository is to be highly curated, rather than the approach by other community-driven documentation platforms, like wikis. Therefore, to be included on docs.scala-lang.org, a document must:

    • “fit in” to the repository (i.e., it should not be a complete duplicate of another article),
    • be polished, i.e. it must be thorough, complete, correct, and organized; written as an article to be understood by many users.
    • be maintained, if the document might require revisions from time to time, be prepared to keep it up to date, or nominate someone to take ownership.

    If you have something you’re thinking about contributing, or that you’re thinking about writing in order to contribute – we’d love to consider it! Please don’t hesitate to use GitHub issues and pull requests and the #scala-contributors room on Discord for any questions, concerns, clarifications, etc.

    Code blocks

    It’s common for various kinds of documents to require code examples. You can contribute code in a Markdown document by either

    • in-line by putting backticks around it,
    • surrounding by triple backticks,
    • or indenting it by 4 spaces, e.g.:
    inline example: `val x = 23`

block example:

```scala
println("hello")
```

indented example:

    case class Foo(x: Int)

    Scala 2 vs Scala 3

    Our goal is to have a unified documentation that covers both Scala 2 and Scala 3. In many cases, the code examples are the same in both Scala 2 and Scala 3, but sometimes there are some syntactic differences. In some less common cases, a page may explain a concept that is new in Scala 3 and has no equivalent in Scala 2, or a concept that has been removed in Scala 3. In all the cases, the documentation should clearly “label” the code examples so that the readers know in which versions of Scala they are valid.

    The following sections explain how to properly “label” the code examples.

    Labelling the code snippets of a page documenting a concept available in both Scala 2 and Scala 3

    When the content of a page not specific to Scala 2 or Scala 3, like for example our Hello World chapter of the Scala Book, the code snippets should show both the Scala 2 and Scala 3 syntax. We achieve this by labelling the code snippets in tabs according to the following rules:

    • if the idiomatic syntax is different in Scala 2 and Scala 3, we create two tabs, “Scala 2” and “Scala 3”, showing the corresponding syntax
    • if the code snippet is idiomatic in both Scala 2 and Scala 3, we create a single tab, “Scala 2 and 3”
    • if the code snippet is valid only in Scala 2 or Scala 3, we create a single tab, “Scala 2 Only” or “Scala 3 Only”

    Here is an example of how you can generate such tabs in Markdown with the tabs directive and class tabs-scala-version:

    {% tabs hello-world-demo class=tabs-scala-version %}

{% tab 'Scala 2' %}
```scala
object hello extends App {
  println("Hello, World!")
}
```
{% endtab %}

{% tab 'Scala 3' %}
```scala
@main def hello() = println("Hello, World!")
```
{% endtab %}

{% endtabs %}

    It is crucial that you use the tabs-scala-version class to benefit from some cool user interactions:

    • all other Scala version tabs on the same page will also switch to current tab, whenever one is changed.
    • the tab picked will be remembered across the site, and when the user returns to the page after some time.

    For code snippets that are valid in both Scala 2 and Scala 3, please use a single tab labelled 'Scala 2 and 3' (please note that the tabs-scala-version class is also dropped):

    {% tabs scala-2-and-3-demo %}
{% tab 'Scala 2 and 3' %}
```scala
List(1, 2, 3).map(x => x + 1).sum
```
{% endtab %}
{% endtabs %}

    For examples that only apply to either one of Scala 2 or 3, use the tabs 'Scala 2 Only' and 'Scala 3 Only'.

    If you have a particularly long tab, for readability you can indicate which tab group it belongs to with a parameter for=tab-group as in this example: 

    {% tabs my-tab-group class=tabs-scala-version %}
...
{% tab 'Scala 3' for=my-tab-group %}
...

    Labelling an entire page documenting a concept that is specific to a Scala version

    When the content of a page explains a concept that is new in Scala 3 and has no equivalent in Scala 2 (e.g. TASTy), or a concept that has been removed in Scala 3, we label the entire page instead of labelling each code example.

    We achieve this by setting a couple of a attributes in the YAML front matter of the Markdown file. For instance, for a page that is specific to Scala 3:

    scala3: true
versionSpecific: true

    Or, for a page that is specific to Scala 2:

    scala2: true
versionSpecific: true

    Please note that when the entire page is labelled, its code examples do not need to have tabs.

    Typechecked Examples

    The site build process uses mdoc to typecheck code snippets in markdown. This is a great way to ensure the code snippets that you’re including typecheck and are valid. Here are a few quick tips to get started:

    First, add mdoc after scala when you are creating a code block. The mdoc modifier here will make sure that mdoc runs the code snippet and ensures that it’s valid.

                ```scala mdoc
val a = 1
```

    If you have a snippet that you expect to fail, you can also account for this by using mdoc:fail for a compile error mdoc:crash for a runtime-error.

    ```scala mdoc:fail
val b: String = 3 // won't compile
```

    Keep in mind that a single file is all compiled as a single unit, so you can’t redefine a variable that was defined above in another code snippet. However there are a couple ways to get around this. Firstly, you can use the mdoc:nest modifier with will wrap the snippet in a scala.Predef.locally{...}. This will essentially “hide” the snippet from the others. Another way around this is to use the mdoc:reset modifier, which resets and forgets about everything up above. Here is an example using the various modifiers.

    ```scala mdoc
import java.time.Instant

def now() = Instant.now()
object Foo {}
```
    ```scala mdoc:nest
case class Foo(a: Int) // conflicts with Foo above, but it's nested so it's fine
```
    ```scala mdoc
val a = s"The time is ${now()}" // still have access to the now method from above
```
    ```scala mdoc:reset
case class Foo(a: String) // forget the previous Foo's and start fresh
```
    ```scala mdoc
val myFoo = Foo("hi") // now we only have access to the last Foo
```

    Document Templates

    Guides/Overviews

    A guide or an overview that can be logically placed on one markdown page should be placed in the directory _overviews/RELEVANT-CATEGORY/. It should have the header:

    ---
layout: singlepage-overview
title: YOUR TITLE
---

    The rest of the document will be written in Markdown syntax.

    You may substitute RELEVANT-CATEGORY for any directory that is related, or create a new one if one is not suitable.

    If your guide/overview consists of multiple pages, like the Collections overview, an ordering must be specified, by numbering documents in their logical order with the num tag in the header, and a name must be assigned to the collection of pages using the partof tag. For example, the following header might be used for a document in the collections overview:

    ---
layout: multipage-overview
title: YOUR TITLE

partof: collections
num: 10
---

    At least one document in the collection must contain a tag in the header, outof, that indicates the total number of documents in the large overview. Putting it on the last page in the overview is often best:

    ---
layout: multipage-overview
title: YOUR TITLE

partof: collections
num: 15
outof: 15
---

    Index pages, such as docs.scala-lang.org/overviews/index.html are generated by reading data from a configuration file, such as _data/overviews.yml, so your overview should be placed into a category there.

    Tutorials

    Tutorials are different to guides, they should be written in a much more concise, task-oriented style, usually on a single page.

    Similar to guides, tutorials also use the same markdown header.

    Once the tutorial is written, to aid user navigation their link must be added to the metadata of /tutorials.md. e.g. it could look like

    ---
layout: root-index-layout
title: Tutorials

tutorials:
...
- title: My New Tutorial
  url: "/tutorials/my-new-tutorial.html"
  description: "Learn How To Do This Specific Task"
  icon: code
---

    You must also add the tutorial to the drop-down list in the navigation bar. To do this, add an extra entry to _data/doc-nav-header.yml. i.e.

    ---
- title: Getting Started
  url: "/getting-started/install-scala.html"
- title: Learn
  ...
- title: Tutorials
  url: "#"
  submenu:
  ...
  - title: My New Tutorial
    url: "/tutorials/my-new-tutorial.html"
...
---

    Cheatsheets

    Cheatsheets have a special layout, and the content is expected to be a Markdown table. To contribute a cheatsheet, you should use the following format:

    ---
layout: cheatsheet
title: YOUR TITLE
by: YOUR NAME
about: SOME TEXT ABOUT THE CHEAT SHEET.
---
| Title A | Title B |
|---------|---------|
| content | more    |

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