Writing documentation

Extending the documentation

To add new documentation to the Thunderbird source docs, you submit a patch to comm-central like you would for a code change.

Documentation is either in a docs folder within a component or in the docs/ folder in the root of the repository and written in either Markdown or reStructuredText.

To add a new documentation topic, add it in docs/config.yml and if necessary also in docs/index.rst. If you’re adding a page to an existing topic, refer to it from the index.md’s TOC to add it to the documentation tree.

Building the docs

To build the docs locally, run ../mach tb-doc. It will build the docs and then open them in your browser.

There are a bunch of flags that can be passed to the command which can bypass build failures that might be irrelevant to your changes. Check out ../mach tb-doc --help.

When your patch has landed, the documentation site should automatically update with your changes.

Further reading

This documentation is based on Sphinx with the read the docs theme.