Docusaurus Terminology

Warning

This package is now diverging from the original package. The core of the package is ESM only and tested with Docusaurus v3

docusaurus-terminology is a node package for creating a terminology structure in your Docusaurus project. This plugin allows you to use terms in your pages that 'stick out' of the surrounding text, while hovering over them makes a popup appear with a short explanation of the term and clicking on the term navigates the user to the page that documents the concept.

You can also generate a glossary with the list of your terms.

How It Works

This plugin, once it's installed in a Docusaurus project, parses docs in two ways:

1. Parses all *.md(x) files under docs/ and replaces each pattern with an appropriate React component supporting a tooltip functionality (see below).
2. Generates a glossary page with all terms corresponding to the *.md(x) files under docs/terms/.

Compatibility

The plugin has been tested with Docusaurus v3.0 and above. The same default environment used by docusaurus satisfies the plugin requirements.

Installation

To install the plugin to your Docusaurus repository, use the command:

npm install @lunaticmuch/docusaurus-terminology

Then, you can add the plugin to docusaurus.config.js file of your repository:

module.exports = {
  // ...
  plugins: [
    '@lunaticmuch/docusaurus-terminology'
  ]
}

Or, you can use it with extra options defined (with more examples in the next sections):

  plugins: [
    [
      "@lunaticmuch/docusaurus-terminology",
      {
        //options
      }
    ]
  ]

Usage

Defining a Term

This plugin assumes that you follow a specific pattern. Each term should have its own .md(x) file, inside the ./docs/terms directory, and it needs to consist of the following structure:

---
id: term_name
title: Term page
hoverText: This hover text will appear in the documentation page that you reference this term
---

### Term explanation

content here

Pay attention to the hoverText attribute, as it is important to provide this attribute (along with the default Docusaurus attributes), so the plugin can fetch the correct popup text to show when referencing a term.

Use Patterns to Reference a Term

When writing docs inside docs/*.md(x) files, in order to refer to a term, you may use the following syntax:

%%term_text|term_name%%

where:

• term_text: The terminology text you want it to be visible in the documentation page
• term_name: The value of the id attribute, which resides in the header of the term file:

  ---
  id: term_name
  ...
  ---

After successfully running the script, the above occurrence will be replaced by a reference (technically a React component) that will render term_text as a link to the corresponding term page, which is in turn generated from the term_name attribute; furthermore, hovering over term_text displays a term summary, as extracted from the corresponding term page.

Example Usage

Say you want to reference a term that exists under the ./docs/terms/ directory, e.g., ./docs/terms/party.md. You can use the following syntax to reference this term in your documentation page:

Some content that wants to reference the %%Party|party%% term

When the script runs, this will be replaced as follows:

Some content that wants to reference the <Term reference="party" popup="Popup text">Party</Term> term

which supports the functionality explained above.

And finally, all you will see in your compiled documentation page, will be:

Some content that wants to reference the Party term

with the word Party containing the described functionality.

Testing the Changes Locally

After writing terms and patterns in your .md files, you can always validate these changes, by running a dry-run command, in order to see compile errors and a sample output of all the changes that will be made from the actual script. You can do that by running:

npm docusaurus parse --dry-run

and you will see in the command line the expected output of the actual command.

Generating the Terminology Documentation

When you are finished referencing terms and have written corresponding term pages, you can test this locally by running:

npm docusaurus parse

This will replace all %%term_text|term_name%% occurrences with the React component supporting the required functionality.

Generating the Glossary Page

If everything works well with the above procedure, you can then generate a glossary page, by running:

npm docusaurus glossary

This will generate a file in ./docs/glossary.md where every term that has been mentioned above will be populated in the glossary.md page.

When to Generate the Terminology Docs

As the terminology plugin actually edits all markdown files, your Git repository will show changes in the git diff command. It is highly recommended to avoid committing the changes, as the plugin will no longer be able to detect patterns that have been altered.

Your best case scenario will be to use the scripts in CI, just before building and deploying the documentation.

The following example of a Gitlab CI job shows how to perform these steps in the CI environment:

...

generate-docs:
	image: node:lts
	stage: build
	before_script:
		- yarn install
	script:
		- yarn docusaurus parse
		- yarn docusaurus glossary
		- yarn build

and then you can use the build directory to serve your documentation.

Configuration Options

For using the plugin with the default options, you can provide just the plugin name in docusaurus.config.js file of your repository:

  plugins: [
    '@lunaticmuch/docusaurus-terminology'
  ]

You can also use some of the following options specified by wrapping the name and an options object in an array inside your configuration:

Option	Description	Type	Default value
termsDir	the directory used to collect the term files	string	./docs/terms
glossaryFilepath	specify the directory and name of the glossary file	string	./docs/glossary.md
patternSeparator	the special character used to separate term_text and term_name in the replace pattern for parsing	string	|
noParseFiles	array of files to be excluded from search/replace	array	[]
noGlossaryFiles	array of term files to not be listed on the glossary page	array	[]
glossaryTermPatterns	array of type values, to choose category/ies of terms to be included in the glossary	array	[]

type: optional attribute in the header of the Markdown files

IMPORTANT NOTE: All file paths need to be relative to the project's root directory. If you want to exclude a file, you should write ./docs/excude-me.md.

Example:

plugins: [
  [
    '@lunaticmuch/docusaurus-terminology',
    {
      termsDir: './docs/terminology/',
      noParseFiles: ['./docs/terminology/agent.md', './docs/terminology/actor.md'],
      noGlossaryFiles: ['./docs/terminology/agent.md'],
      glossaryTermPatterns: ['concept']
    }
  ]
]

To Do

• Include the option to select a Popover as alternative to Tooltip for longer descriptions
• Include addtional options in the Term tag to control classes

Original Author

This plugin has been originally developed by Thanasis Katsadas [email protected] and the Greek Government. The original work is still available on GRNet Gitlab.