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How to Re-brand CentreStack Documentation in Minutes with GitHub

Franklyn Peart
Updated

Re-branding the CentreStack UI is a fairly straightforward process that can be completed by making a few changes in the branding sections of the management console. But re-branding the CentreStack documentation has been a prohibitively time consuming process until recently. Unfortunately, many partners are not aware that all CentreStack documentation has now been placed into GitHub so they can each be re-branded in minutes by changing a few lines in a configuration file.

In this article, we'll outline the process. As a pre-requisite, you'll need two accounts. One in GitHub to create a copy of the CentreStack documentation in the public domain and another with Read The Docs to build the documentation. With these accounts in place, you'll follow a simple three step process:

Step 1: Fork the CentreStack Document Repository at https://github.com/jerryhgladinet/docs and review the Readme file

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This step can be a little confusing. For example, you may have to do it twice if you create your GutHub account during the process. But it will eventually create a copy of the entire repository in your own account. Once the fork has been completed, take a look at the Readme.md file which will outline how to  modify the configuration files to replace CentreStack branding with your own by modifying the conf.py file in each document project. Within each of these files, there is a prodname parameter you can change before you build the doc into HTML files. There are two other parameters that will get replaced throughout the documents - copyright and author.

copyright = '2018, Gladinet, Inc.'
author = 'Gladinet, Inc.'
prodname = 'CentreStack Server'

Note that the readme file also explains how to build the documentation on Windows and Linux but you don't necessarily need to do that if you're using Read The Docs to build and host.

Step 2: Modify the configuration files 

Each document has a corresponding project with a conf.py file that will need to be changed. For example, let's take a look at the Administration Guide:

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You'll need to navigate to the source directory to find and modify its conf.py file: 

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Step 3: Import Repository into Read the Docs, Rebuild and Host

You can always build the HTML output or the PDF output and host it on your own. Those processes is described in the readme, but this article is focused on the easiest way to produce a branded instance of the CentreStack documentation. And so the final step will be to import the project into Read the Docs hosting. Read the Docs will rebuild and host your branded documentation for you.

Example RTD hosting:

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