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Documentation

Documentation is incredibly important to Fides, both for explaining its concepts to general audiences and describing its usage to developers.

Concepts

Fides includes a great deal of "concept" documentation, which covers features, tutorials, guides, and examples separately from the auto-generated API reference. This page is part of the concept documentation for development!

To write concept docs, add Markdown files to the docs/fidesops/docs/ directory (or one of its subdirectories). To ensure that your page is displayed in the navigation, edit mkdocs.yml to include a reference to it.

Semantics

Capitalization

Concepts that refer to proper nouns or are trademarked should always be capitalized, including "Fides". Fides tools, such as "fidesops" and "fidesctl" should always be lowercase.

Other Fides terms, like "Data Category" or "System", should also be capitalized to be clear about the fact that a Fides resource is being referenced.

When a System is applied, it is either created or updated through the FidesAPI.

The System model requires a field called fides_key.

Previewing docs locally

Documentation (including both concepts and API references) is built and deployed with every merge to Fides's master branch.

If you're using VS Code Dev Containers, the docs will automatically be available at localhost:8000, otherwise you'll need to run the following command:

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nox -s docs_serve

You'll see a status update as the docs build, and then an announcement that they are available on http://127.0.0.1:8000.

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