Ansible style guide¶

Welcome to the Ansible style guide! To create clear, concise, consistent, useful materials on docs.ansible.com, follow these guidelines:

Linguistic guidelines
reStructuredText guidelines
- Header notation
- Internal navigation
More resources

Linguistic guidelines ¶

We want the Ansible documentation to be:

clear
direct
conversational
easy to translate

We want reading the docs to feel like having an experienced, friendly colleague explain how Ansible works.

Stylistic cheat-sheet ¶

This cheat-sheet illustrates a few rules that help achieve the “Ansible tone”:

Rule	Good example	Bad example
Use active voice	You can run a task by	A task can be run by
Use the present tense	This command creates a	This command will create a
Address the reader	As you expand your inventory	When the number of managed nodes grows
Use standard English	Return to this page	Hop back to this page
Use American English	The color of the output	The colour of the output

Header case ¶

Headers should be written in sentence case. For example, this section’s title is Header case, not Header Case or HEADER CASE.

Avoid using Latin phrases ¶

Latin words and phrases like e.g. or etc. are easily understood by English speakers. They may be harder to understand for others and are also tricky for automated translation.

Use the following English terms in place of Latin terms or abbreviations:

Latin	English
i.e	in other words
e.g.	for example
etc	and so on
via	by/ through
vs./versus	rather than/against

reStructuredText guidelines ¶

The Ansible documentation is written in reStructuredText and processed by Sphinx. We follow these technical or mechanical guidelines on all rST pages:

Section headers in reStructuredText can use a variety of notations. Sphinx will ‘learn on the fly’ when creating a hierarchy of headers. To make our documents easy to read and to edit, we follow a standard set of header notations. We use:

### with overline, for parts:

###############
Developer guide
###############

*** with overline, for chapters:

*******************
Ansible style guide
*******************

=== for sections:

Mechanical guidelines
=====================

--- for subsections:

Internal navigation
-------------------

^^^ for sub-subsections:

Adding anchors
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

""" for paragraphs:

Paragraph that needs a title
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

Internal navigation ¶

Anchors (also called labels) and links work together to help users find related content. Local tables of contents also help users navigate quickly to the information they need. All internal links should use the :ref: syntax. Every page should have at least one anchor to support internal :ref: links. Long pages, or pages with multiple levels of headers, can also include a local TOC.

Adding anchors ¶

Include at least one anchor on every page
Place the main anchor above the main header
If the file has a unique title, use that for the main page anchor:
```
.. _unique_page::
```
You may also add anchors elsewhere on the page

Adding internal links ¶

All internal links must use :ref: syntax. These links both point to the anchor defined above:

:ref:`unique_page`
:ref:`this page <unique_page>`

The second example adds custom text for the link.

Adding links to modules and plugins ¶

Module links use the module name followed by _module for the anchor.
Plugin links use the plugin name followed by the plugin type. For example, enable become plugin).

:ref:`this module <this_module>``
:ref:`that connection plugin <that_connection>`

Adding local TOCs ¶

The page you’re reading includes a local TOC. If you include a local TOC:

place it below, not above, the main heading and (optionally) introductory text
use the :local: directive so the page’s main header is not included
do not include a title

The syntax is:

.. contents::
   :local:

More resources ¶

These pages offer more help with grammatical, stylistic, and technical rules for documentation.