Table of contents

• Documentation configuration
• Architecture of documentation for Airflow
• Diagrams of the documentation architecture
• Staging site
• Typical workflows
  • Publishing the documentation by the release manager
  • Publishing changes to the website (including theme)
• Fixing historical documentation
  • Manually publishing documentation directly to S3
  • Manually publishing documentation via apache-airflow-site-archive repo

Documentation configuration

This directory used to contain all the documentation files for the project. The documentation has been split into separate folders - the documentation is now in the folders in sub-projects that they are referring to.

If you look for the documentation, it is stored as follows:

Documentation in separate distributions:

• airflow-core/docs - documentation for Airflow Core
• providers/**/docs - documentation for Providers
• chart/docs - documentation for the Helm Chart
• task-sdk/docs - documentation for Task SDK (new format not yet published)
• airflow-ctl/docs - documentation for Airflow CLI

Documentation for a general overview and summaries not connected with any specific distribution:

• docker-stack-docs - documentation for Docker Stack'
• providers-summary-docs - documentation for the provider summary page

Architecture of documentation for Airflow

Building documentation for Airflow is optimized for speed and for the convenience workflows of the release managers and committers who publish and fix the documentation - that‘s why it’s a little complex, as we have multiple repositories and multiple sources of documentation involved.

There are a few repositories under apache organization that are used to build the documentation for Airflow:

• apache-airflow - the repository with the code and the documentation sources for Airflow distributions, provider distributions, providers' summary, and docker summary: apache-airflow. From here, we publish the documentation to an S3 bucket where the documentation is hosted.
• airflow-site - the repository with the website theme and content where we keep sources of the website structure, navigation, and theme for the website airflow-site. From here, we publish the website to the ASF servers so they are published as the official website
• airflow-site-archive - here we keep the archived historical versions of the generated documentation of all the documentation packages that we keep on S3. This repository is automatically synchronized from the S3 buckets and is only used in case we need to perform a bulk update of historical documentation. Here, only generated html, css, js, and images files are kept; no sources of the documentation are kept here.

We have two S3 buckets where we can publish the documentation generated from the apache-airflow repository:

• s3://live-docs-airflow-apache-org/docs/ - live, official documentation
• s3://staging-docs-airflow-apache-org/docs/ - staging documentation official documentation TODO: make it work

Diagrams of the documentation architecture

This is the diagram of live documentation architecture:

Staging site

Staging documentation architecture is similar, but uses staging bucket and staging Apache Website. The main differences are:

• The staging bucket is s3://staging-docs-airflow-apache-org/docs/
• The staging website is https://airflow.staged.apache.org/docs/
• The staging site is deployed by merging PR or pushing the staging branch in the airflow-site repository rather than main. The staging branch should be periodically rebased to the main branch, but while some changes are developed in staging, it can diverge from the main branch.
• Merging into the staging branch of the airflow-site repository or pushing the staging branch will automatically trigger the build of the website and publish it to the publish-staging branch and effectively to the staging site.

Documentation of pre-release versions of Airflow distributions should be published to the staging S3 bucket so that we can test the documentation before we publish it to the live bucket.

Typical workflows

There are a few typical workflows that we support:

Publishing the documentation by the release manager

The release manager publishes the documentation using GitHub Actions workflow Publish Docs to S3. The same workflow can be used to publish Airflow, Helm chart, and providers' documentation.

This workflow is used twice:

• when pre-release distributions are prepared (alpha/beta/rc) - the documentation should be published to the staging bucket and staging site should be built and published.
• when final releases of distributions are prepared - the documentation should be published to the live bucket and the live website should be built and published.

When the release manager publishes the documentation, they choose auto destination by default - depending on the tag they use - staging will be used to publish from pre-release tag and live will be used ot publish from the release tag.

You can also specify whether live or staging documentation should be published manually - overriding the auto-detection.

The person who triggers the build (release manager) should specify the tag name of the docs to be published and the list of documentation packages to be published. Usually it is:

• Airflow: apache-airflow docker-stack task-sdk apache-airflow-ctl
• Helm chart: helm-chart
• Providers: provider_id1 provider_id2 or all providers if all providers should be published.

Optionally - specifically if we run all-providers and the release manager wants to exclude some providers, they can specify documentation packages to exclude. Leaving “no-docs-excluded” will publish all packages specified to be published without exclusions.

Example screenshot of the workflow triggered from the GitHub UI:

Note that this just publishes the documentation but does not update the “site” with version numbers or stable links to providers and airflow - if you release a new documentation version, it will be available with direct URL (say https://apache.airflow.org/docs/apache-airflow/3.0.1/), but the main site will still point to the previous version of the documentation as stable and the version drop-downs will not be updated.

In order to do it, you need to run the Build docs workflow in airflow-site repository.

For live site you should run the workflow in main branch. For staging site it should be staging branch. This will build the website and publish it to the publish branch of airflow-site repository (for live site) or publish-staging branch (for staging site). The workflow will also update the website, including refreshing the version numbers in the drop-downs and stable links.

The staging documentation is produced automatically with staging watermark added.

This workflow also invalidates cache in Fastly that Apache Software Foundation uses to serve the website, so you should always run it after you modify the documentation for the website. Other than that Fastly is configured with 3600 seconds TTL - which means that changes will propagate to the website in ~1 hour.

Shortly after the workflow succeeds and documentation is published, in the live bucket, the airflow-site-archive repository is automatically synchronized with the live S3 bucket. TODO: IMPLEMENT THIS, FOR NOW IT HAS TO BE MANUALLY SYNCHRONIZED VIA Sync s3 to GitHub workflow in airflow-site-archive repository. The airflow-site-archive essentially keeps the history of snapshots of the live documentation.

Publishing changes to the website (including theme)

The workflows in apache-airflow only update the documentation for the packages (Airflow, Helm chart, Providers, Docker Stack) that we publish from airflow sources. If we want to publish changes to the website itself or to the theme (css, javascript) we need to do it in airflow-site repository.

Publishing of airflow-site happens automatically when a PR from airflow-site is merged to main or when the Build docs workflow is triggered manually in the main branch of airflow-site repository. The workflow builds the website and publishes it to publish branch of airflow-site repository, which in turn gets picked up by the ASF servers and is published as the official website. This includes any changes to .htaccess of the website.

Such a main build also publishes the latest “sphinx-airflow-theme” package to GitHub so that the next build of documentation can automatically pick it up from there. This means that if you want to make changes to javascript or css that are part of the theme, you need to do it in airflow-site repository and merge it to main branch in order to be able to run the documentation build in apache-airflow repository and pick up the latest version of the theme.

The version of sphinx theme is fixed in both repositories:

• https://github.com/apache/airflow-site/blob/main/sphinx_airflow_theme/sphinx_airflow_theme/init.py#L21
• https://github.com/apache/airflow/blob/main/devel-common/pyproject.toml#L77 in “docs” section

In case of bigger changes to the theme, we can first iterate on the website and merge a new theme version, and only after that can we switch to the new version of the theme.

Fixing historical documentation

Sometimes we need to update historical documentation (modify generated html) - for example, when we find bad links or when we change some of the structure in the documentation. This can be done via the airflow-site-archive repository. The workflow is as follows:

1. Get the latest version of the documentation from S3 to airflow-site-archive repository using Sync S3 to GitHub workflow. This will download the latest version of the documentation from S3 to airflow-site-archive repository (this should normally not be needed, if automated synchronization works).
2. Make the changes to the documentation in airflow-site-archive repository. This can be done using any text editor, script, etc. Those files are generated as html files and are not meant to be regenerated, they should be modified as html files in-place
3. Commit the changes to airflow-site-archive repository and push them to some branch of the repository.
4. Create a Pull Request from that branch and merge it to main
5. Run Sync GitHub to S3 workflow in airflow-site-archive repository. This will upload the modified documentation to the S3 bucket. Use main branch (default) as “Reference of the commit used for synchronization”. You can choose whether to sync the changes to live or staging bucket. The default is live:
6. By default, the workflow will synchronize all documentation modified in a single last commit pushed to the main. You can also specify full_sync to synchronize all files in the repository if you want to make sure that S3 reflects main. The workflow might run for a long time (hours) in case of full sync or many changes to the .html files.
7. In case you specify full_sync, you can also synchronize all docs or only selected documentation packages (for example apache-airflow or docker-stack or amazon or helm-chart) - you can specify more than one package separated by spaces.
8. The workflow will invalidate Cloudflare cache for “live” or “staging” bucket respectively.
9. Run the “Build docs” workflow in airflow-site repository to make sure that Fastly cache of the https://airflow.apache.org or https://airflow.staged.apache.org/ invalidated. Use main to rebuild site for live site and staging to rebuild the staging site:

Manually publishing documentation directly to S3

The regular publishing workflows involve running a GitHub Actions workflow, and they cover the majority of cases. However, sometimes, some manual updates and cherry-picks are needed, when we discover problems with the publishing and doc building code - for example, when we find that we need to fix extensions to sphinx.

In such a case, the release manager or a committer can build and publish documentation locally - providing that they configure AWS credentials to be able to upload files to S3. You can ask in the #internal-airflow-ci-cd channel on Airflow Slack to get your AWS credentials configured.

You can checkout locally a version of airflow repo that you need and apply any cherry-picks you need before running publishing.

This is done using breeze. You also need to have AWS CLI installed and configured credentials to be able to upload files to S3. You can get credentials from one of the admins of Airflow's AWS account. The region to set for AWS is us-east-2.

Note that it is advised to add --dry-run if you just want to see what would happen. Also, you can use the s3://staging-docs-airflow-apache-org/docs/ bucket to test the publishing using staging site.

breeze build-docs "<package_id1>" "<package_id2>" --docs-only
mkdir /tmp/airflow-site
breeze release-management publish-docs --override-versioned --airflow-site-directory /tmp/airflow-site
breeze release-management publish-docs-to-s3 --source-dir-path /tmp/airflow-site/docs-archive \
 --destination-location s3://live-docs-airflow-apache-org/docs/ --stable-versions \
 --exclude-docs "<package_id1_to_exclude> <package_id2_to_exclude>" [--dry-run]

Manually publishing documentation via apache-airflow-site-archive repo

If you do not have S3 credentials and want to be careful about publishing the documentation, you can also use publishing via apache-airflow-site-archive repository. This is a little more complex, but it allows you to publish documentation without having S3 credentials.

The process is as follows:

1. Run Sync s3 to GitHub workflow in apache-airflow-site-archive repository. This will download the latest version of the documentation from S3 to airflow-site-archive repository (this should normally not be needed, if automated synchronization works).
2. Checkout the apache-airflow-site-archive repository and create a branch for your changes.
3. Build documentation locally in apache-airflow repo with any cherry-picks and modifications you need, and publish the docs to the checked out airflow-site-archive branch.

breeze build-docs "<package_id1>" "<package_id2>" --docs-only
breeze release-management publish-docs --override-versioned --airflow-site-directory <PATH_TO_THE_ARCHIVE_REPO>

4. Commit the changes to apache-airflow-site-archive repository and push them to some branch of the repository.
5. Run Sync GitHub to S3 workflow in apache-airflow-site-archive repository. This will upload the modified documentation to S3 bucket. You can choose whether to sync the changes to live or staging bucket. The default is live. You can also specify which folders to sync - by default, all modified folders are synced.
6. After you synchronize the changes to S3, the Sync S3 to GitHub workflow will be triggered automatically and the changes will be synchronized to airflow-site-archive main branch - so there is no need to merge your changes to main branch of airflow-site-archive repository. You can safely delete the branch you created in step 2.