langchain/docs/docs/contributing/documentation.mdx

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# Contribute Documentation

The docs directory contains Documentation and API Reference.

Documentation is built using [Quarto](https://quarto.org) and [Docusaurus 2](https://docusaurus.io/).

API Reference are largely autogenerated by [sphinx](https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/) from the code and are hosted by [Read the Docs](https://readthedocs.org/).
For that reason, we ask that you add good documentation to all classes and methods.

Similar to linting, we recognize documentation can be annoying. If you do not want to do it, please contact a project maintainer, and they can help you with it. We do not want this to be a blocker for good code getting contributed.

## Build Documentation Locally

### Install dependencies

- [Quarto](https://quarto.org) - package that converts Jupyter notebooks (`.ipynb` files) into mdx files for serving in Docusaurus.
- `poetry install` from the monorepo root

### Building

In the following commands, the prefix `api_` indicates that those are operations for the API Reference.

Before building the documentation, it is always a good idea to clean the build directory:

```bash
make docs_clean
make api_docs_clean
```

Next, you can build the documentation as outlined below:

```bash
make docs_build
make api_docs_build
```

Finally, run the link checker to ensure all links are valid:

```bash
make docs_linkcheck
make api_docs_linkcheck
```

### Linting and Formatting

The docs are linted from the monorepo root. To lint the docs, run the following from there:

```bash
poetry install --with lint,typing
make lint
```

If you have formatting-related errors, you can fix them automatically with:

```bash
make format
``` 

## Verify Documentation changes

After pushing documentation changes to the repository, you can preview and verify that the changes are
what you wanted by clicking the `View deployment` or `Visit Preview` buttons on the pull request `Conversation` page.
This will take you to a preview of the documentation changes.
This preview is created by [Vercel](https://vercel.com/docs/getting-started-with-vercel).