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CasperLabs TechSpec

tl;dr on how to work and contribute

• The whole document is written in a plaintext format called reStructuredText, and compiled into HTML and PDF by a documentation generator called Sphinx.
• The recommended way of working on this doc is with the static HTML output with live reload.
  • Open up a terminal, go to the project directory and run make livehtml.
  • Choose a page to work on. Open up that page in your text editor. Also navigate to that page in your browser. Set the browser window and editor side-by-side on your screen.
  • Make changes in your editor. When you save, Sphinx Autobuild will automatically refresh any browser tabs that has the document opened up.
• The documents are hosted on the paid version of Read the Docs. The CI workflow is described as follows:
  • Contributors must create their own branch, commit, and create a pull request on GitHub.
  • The pull request must be reviewed by another member of the team before it can be merged.
  • When the branch is merged to master, Read the Docs automatically recompiles all output, served on techspec.casperlabs.io.

Installing Sphinx and Other Modules

Install the following Python packages using pip:

On Mac/Linux:

sudo pip3 install sphinx sphinx-rtd-theme recommonmark sphinx-autobuild pydata-sphinx-theme

On Windows:

Start cmd in Admin mode. Make sure Python binaries are in your $PATH and run

pip3 install sphinx sphinx-rtd-theme recommonmark sphinx-autobuild pydata-sphinx-theme

Installing a TeX Distribution

Sphinx generates the LaTeX files, but the program that generates the PDF by compiling those files, pdflatex, is not included in Sphinx. The LaTeX compiler comes from a TeX distribution, e.g. TeX Live (Linux), MacTeX (Mac) or MiKTex (Windows).

Note: If you don't want to deal with installing a TeX distribution, you can upload the generated files under _build/latex/ to an online service like Overleaf. The downside is that you would have to upload from scratch every time you need to compile, so this is only a workaround for when you can't get it to compile due to some weird reason.

If you are installing TeX Live on a Debian based distro, make sure that you have all the packages from TeX Live installed. Otherwise, you may run into issues due to missing LaTeX packages.

sudo apt-get install texlive*

If you are still running into problems, you may solve them using TeX Live's own distribution instead of the packages from the native package manager.

Building

Run make to see the many output options.

Note: You don't need to be on Linux to work on the TechSpec. You can work on any OS of your choice as (e.g. Mac, Windows) long as Python and Sphinx are installed, and relevant binaries are in your $PATH. Windows doesn't come with make, so it might be a good idea to use Windows Subsystem for Linux. The other option is to invoke sphinx-build directly, e.g.

$ sphinx-build -M html "." "_build"

Static HTML

To generate the website, run

make html

This generates the website under _build/html/. To view it, open the file _build/html/index.html in your browser.

Static HTML with live reload

It's too tedious to type in make html every time one needs a preview. Sphinx Autobuild is an external module built to remedy this issue. Files are tracked in real time and the website is built from scratch every time a change is detected.

To use it, run

make livehtml

This starts a server which serves the live content on http://localhost:8000/.

PDF through LaTeX

To generate the PDF (LaTeX), run

make latexpdf

This generates the PDF _build/latex/CasperLabsTechSpec.pdf.

IMPORTANT: Sometimes the Makefile can't capture all the changes in the files, and builds fail unless started from scratch. If you run into problems, run make clean before building:

make clean; make html

or

make clean; make latexpdf

Editing

This section outlines a recommended way of editing reStructuredText files. I chose VS Code as an example, but you could reproduce the same configuration with your own text editor. Editing will not require a lot of features or IDEs. On the other hand, good-to-haves are syntax highlighting, and keybindings to insert frequently used rst directives such as :math:`...` .

Setting up VS Code

1. Install VS Code.
2. Go to the extensions sidebar (Ctrl+X) and install the extension reStructuredText.

Structuring your content

• Don't impose hard wraps on lines with line breaks. Instead, configure your editor to word wrap. For example, this is achieved in Emacs by disabling auto-fill-mode and enabling visual-line-mode.
• Setup your file structure in no more than 2 levels.
• Format your content with no more than 3 heading levels.
• To reference content within the guide, use :ref: (e.g., see :ref:Execution Semantics <execution-semantics-urefs> for for more information).
• To reference content to git source, link to the master branch (e.g. https://github.com/casper-network/casper-node/tree/master/smart_contracts/contracts). If the content you want to link has not been merged to master yet, then you can link to the dev branch.
• To cross-reference content of CasperLabs tools and references like SDKs, APIs, etc., link to the newest published GIT sources and versions (e.g., cargo-casper CLI tool -- https://crates.io/crates/cargo-casper or https://github.com/casper-network/casper-node/tree/dev/execution_engine_testing/cargo_casper (those two links have equivalent information - it's the README from the crate's root)).