Contributing to Docs

This page explains how the beef monorepo keeps documentation honest. Every gate below runs in CI and can be run locally before pushing.

Philosophy

Docs are a single source of truth, not a courtesy. If a behaviour, contract, or operational procedure exists only in code, future-you (and on-call) cannot find it. The CI gates make “the docs lie” a build failure rather than a tribal-knowledge problem.

File layout

docs/src/content/docs/overview/ — high-level orientation.
docs/src/content/docs/architecture/ — cross-service architecture.
docs/src/content/docs/services/ — per-service deep dives. Mirrors apps/*.
docs/src/content/docs/standards/ — coding, testing, and review conventions.
docs/src/content/docs/operations/ — runbooks, on-call, deploys.
docs/src/content/docs/flows/ — end-to-end user/data flows that span services.
docs/src/content/docs/decisions/ — Architectural Decision Records (ADRs).
docs/src/content/docs/generated/ — machine-generated content. Do not hand-edit.

ADRs

Write an ADR whenever you make a non-trivial, hard-to-reverse decision: choice of library, protocol, data model, sync vs async boundary, vendor, etc. If you would explain it in a design review, write it down.

Copy docs/src/content/docs/decisions/_template.md.
Filename: YYYY-MM-DD-kebab-slug.md.
Required frontmatter: title, status (Proposed | Accepted | Superseded | Deprecated), date.
Required sections: ## Context, ## Decision, ## Consequences. Optional: ## Alternatives Considered.

The adr-template-check CI gate enforces the above.

CI gates

The Docs Quality workflow (.github/workflows/docs-quality.yml) runs on every PR and on push to main:

Gate	What it checks
`markdown-lint`	Markdown style across `docs/*/.md` and root `*.md` per `.markdownlint.jsonc`.
`link-check`	Scheduled external URL health via Lychee.
`astro-build`	Locked Starlight production build.
`source-checks`	ADR shape, proto/KB sync, frontmatter, citations, and internal routes/anchors.
`docs-required-check`	A PR touching `apps/` or `proto/` must also touch `docs/` (or carry a bypass marker).

Run the gates locally

From the repo root:

# Astro build
pnpm --dir docs install --frozen-lockfile
pnpm --dir docs build

# Markdown lint
pnpm dlx markdownlint-cli2 "docs/**/*.md" "*.md"

# ADR template
bash scripts/docs-check-adr-template.sh

# Proto sync
bash scripts/docs-check-proto-sync.sh

# KB, frontmatter, citations, and internal links
bash scripts/docs-check-kb-sync.sh
node scripts/docs-check-frontmatter.mjs
node scripts/docs-check-citations.mjs
go run scripts/check-doc-links.go

# Docs-required (simulates the PR check against main)
GITHUB_BASE_REF=main PR_TITLE="$(git log -1 --pretty=%s)" bash scripts/docs-check-required.sh

Bypassing the docs-required check

The docs-required-check gate fails when a PR changes code under apps/* or proto/* but does not change anything under docs/. Bypass it only when a docs update is genuinely not needed.

Add one of the following to the PR title:

[skip-docs]: <short reason> — e.g. [skip-docs]: internal log-format tweak.
A conventional-commit prefix that implies no behavioural change: chore:, ci:, test:, style:.

Use sparingly. If reviewers cannot tell from the diff that no doc was needed, write the doc.

Regenerating the proto API doc

Proto reference output lives at docs/src/content/docs/generated/proto-api.md and ends with a  marker. After editing any proto/**/*.proto file:

bash scripts/gen-proto-docs.sh

The generator and sync checker must change together if their checksum algorithm changes.