Yaskawa Europe GmbH launches the new website for MotoLogix.
In July 2021 we migrated from traditional (PDF) documents to a CI build documentation website. With this development we wanted to achieve the following goals:
- Improve the quality of the documentation.
- Get new features quicker to our customers.
- Implement the docs-as-code philosophy in our workflow.
Implementation
Some technical details on the implementation:
Architecture
All content and source code resides in (private) Git repositories, hosted on https://github.com/YaskawaEurope .
Content
A collection of markdown, yaml and IEC61131 structured text files.
Automation
On a push event of any of the repositories, a CI pipeline is started and within a few minutes the updated documentation is available to the customers. Such a process is also known as Continous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD).
The CI pipeline (using GitHub actions) has the following stages:
- Importing the content from the various repositories.
- Building the static HTML pages using the Hugo static site generator and the PLC docs theme .
- Deployment to the web server using SSH.
Benefits
Although some people might still favour printed paper or PDF, the use of web technology for the documentation comes with some benefits:
User friendly source code thanks to syntax highlighting and code snippets:
i := i + 1; // this is a commentMore relevant guides (e.g. setup information for a specific part number ).