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
  • Stylistic cheat-sheet
  • Header case
  • Avoid using Latin phrases
• reStructuredText guidelines
  • Header notation
  • Internal navigation
    • Adding anchors
    • Adding internal links
    • Adding links to modules and plugins
    • Adding local TOCs
• 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:

Header notation

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

Ansible 2.10 and later require the extended Fully Qualified Collection Name (FQCN) as part of the links:

ansible_collections. + FQCN + _module

For example:

:ref:`ansible.builtin.first_found lookup plugin <ansible_collections.ansible.builtin.first_found_lookup>`

displays as ansible.builtin.first_found lookup plugin.

Modules require different suffixes from other plugins:

• Module links use this extended FQCN module name with _module for the anchor.

• Plugin links use this extended FQCN plugin name with the plugin type (_connection for example).

:ref:`arista.eos.eos_config <ansible_collections.arista.eos.eos_config_module>`
:ref:`community.kubernetes.kubectl connection plugin <ansible_collections.community.kubernetes.kubectl_connection>`

ansible.builtin is the FQCN for modules included in ansible.base. Documentation links are the only place you prepend ansible_collections to the FQCN. This is used by the documentation build scripts to correctly fetch documentation from collections on Ansible Galaxy.

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.

• Basic rules
• Voice Style
• Trademark Usage
• Grammar and Punctuation
• Spelling - Word Usage - Common Words and Phrases to Use and Avoid
• Writing documentation so search can find it
• Resources

See also

Contributing to the Ansible Documentation

How to contribute to the Ansible documentation

Testing the documentation locally

How to build the Ansible documentation

irc.freenode.net

#ansible-docs IRC chat channel

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