This page contains video recordings and written tips for non-engineering team members on how to work Handbook-First. In these videos, we run through the GitLab Handbook with experts, uncovering how to best use the Handbook in our day-to-day work, and learning best-practices for Handbook editing along the way. This page is intended to be complementary to Using GitLab at GitLab, and we suggest you start there if you have not yet completed the GitLab 101 Tool Certification.
Have your own practical Handbook editing tips? Drop a video below!
Please note that the video mentions that you need to go to source/handbook to create a page which is no longer the case. The handbook is located under sites/handbook/source/handbook.
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This video walks you through moving the location of a handbook page. There is a 1 min delay, so recommend starting the video at 1:03 for efficient viewing. We have seen that it may take over 24 hours for the move to completely take place, so even after the pipeline passes, you may still have an instance where the origial link AND the new link both still work.
Keep in mind that if you have links throught the handbook that link to your old page, you will need to update those links so you don't receive a 400 error.
You may also request a redirect. That process is outlined here.
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Every GitLab team member has an entry in team_members/person and when a new manager joins a team, updates are needed in three places:
reports_to to include the new manager slugstages.yml to indicate the new manager for the team (if part of engineering/product)Find step by step instructions on how to update the individual YAMLs in the Edit this website locally handbook page
Some tips may require terminal shell access on macOS/Linux. Ensure that your environment is working and that you have cloned the www-gitlab-com project for example.
git clone https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com.git
Sync it. Ensure that you stash away local changed not yet committed.
cd www-gitlab-com
git stash
git checkout master
git pull
On macOS it is advised to use Homebrew and install the GNU tools. See this blogpost for a macOS setup.
brew install gnu-sed
One of the shell tools provided with macOS/Linux GNU is find. Open a terminal an run the following command in the main directory of the www-gitlab-com repository to get a list of all *.md files. This matches .md as suffix.
find . -type f -name '*.md'
Instead of the . you can also use a directory in the current path.
find source/handbook -type f -name '*.md'
The type f specifies files, d matches for directories. When not specified, all files and directories are taken into account.
You can replace -name with -regex to do more sensitive matching, for example to match all .md and .md.erb files.
find . -type f -regex '.*\.md[.erb]*'
This can be useful to check whether a blog post was merged to master:
git checkout master
git pull
find . -type f -name '*blogpost-filename*'
This comes in handy when you want to print all matches with a prefix, or perform additional replace actions. The main principle is to follow the matching rules explained above, and add the -exec parameter.
The exec action should start a shell and execute a command in there. sh -c '' \; takes care of this for every file that matches. Imagine this as a loop of sequential steps to perform the action. The last missing bit is accessing the file in the current loop iteration. This is done via the {} marker inside the echo example printing the output.
Run the command in a terminal to see how it works:
find source/handbook/marketing -type f -name '*.md' -exec sh -c 'echo "Matched {}"' \;
The GNU sed shell command is useful to replace a defined string in a file. The -i flag specifies to do that inline in the same file. The g flag defines a global match, replacing all pattern matches.
sed -i 's/<searchtext>/<replacementtext>/g' file.md
On macOS, ensure that the gnu-sed package is installed, and run gsed (instead of sed).
gsed -i 's/<searchtext>/<replacementtext>/g' file.md
With using the / separator, it is necessary to escape all / characters in the string. You can avoid this by choosing another separator, for example ,:
gsed -i 's,<searchtext>,<replacementtext>,g' file.md
Sometimes a project, URL target or Slack channel is being renamed. You can easily search and edit with the Web IDE on GitLab.com but for other files there is a quick and automated way required.
This method combines the find, exec and sed tips explained above. The exec action is now to use sed to perform an inline replacement of a pattern/string.
The following example is used in this MR for updating the Corporate Marketing project URL in all files.
git checkout master
git pull origin master
git checkout -b handbook/corp-mktg-project-url
find source/handbook -type f -exec sh -c 'gsed -i "s,https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/corporate-marketing,https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/corporate_marketing/corporate-marketing,g" "{}"' \;
git status
git diff
git commit -av -m "Handbook: Update corporate marketing project URL"
git push -u origin handbook/corp-mktg-project-url
<open URL in browser for MR>
To cut it down:
source/handbook directory. The URL might be found in other files too.exec runs a sed/gsed actionhttps://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/corporate-marketing with https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/corporate_marketing/corporate-marketinggit status and git diff before committing them