drobee / nova-documentation

A Laravel Nova tool that allows you to add markdown-based documentation to your administrator's dashboard.

Documentation tool for Laravel Nova

This is a tool for Laravel's Nova administrator panel that allows you to create markdown-based documentation for your application; without having to leave the Nova environment.

Features

• Parses each markdown document and renders them in the Nova dashboard
• Dynamic page titles: Each h1 tag (# title) is set as the page title
  • Each page title is then used to construct a sidebar, allowing for navigation through your documentation.
  • Allows for nested directories
• Syntax highlighting for code blocks (via highlight.js)
• Replaces local links within the body content to work within the Nova environment.

Installation

You can install the package via composer:

composer require dniccum/nova-documentation

You will then need to publish the package's configuration and blade view files to your applications installation:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Dniccum\NovaDocumentation\ToolServiceProvider"

Finally, you will need to register the tool within the NovaServiceProvider.php:

use Dniccum\NovaDocumentation\NovaDocumentation;

...

/**
 * Get the tools that should be listed in the Nova sidebar.
 *
 * @return array
 */
public function tools()
{
    return [
        // other tools
        new NovaDocumentation,
    ];
}

Using this tool

• After all of this tool's assets have been published, there should be two .md (markdown) files placed within a documentation directory at the base of your resources directory.
  • If you would like to change this directory, change the config('novadocumentation.home') configuration definition.
  • By default, the "home page" entry point is home.md. Again if you would like to change that, be sure that you alter the config('novadocumentation.home') configuration.
• The sidebar navigation is constructed using two different elements: the name of the file and the title of within the file. This title is dynamically pulled from the first # title in each file.

Linking

If you would like to link to other markdown files within your body content, outside of the sidebar, be sure to use relative links. For example if you are linking from the home page to a sub-directory based file called authentication, you would link to it like so:

[authentication](authentication/base.md)

The tool will dynamically replace this link.

Configuration

The configuration items listed below can be found in the novadocumentation.php configuration file.

<?php

return [

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Title
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | The name/title of this tool that will appear on the home page and within
    | the navigation.
    |
    */

    'title' => 'Documentation',

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Markdown Flavor
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | The flavor/style of markdown that will be used. The GitHub flavor is the
    | default as it supports code blocks and other "common" uses.
    |
    */

    'flavor' => 'github',

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Home Page
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | The markdown document that will be used as the home page and/or entry
    | point. This will be located within the documentation directory that resides
    | within your application's resources directory.
    |
    */

    'home' => 'documentation/home.md',

];

License

The Nova Documentation tool is free software licensed under the MIT license.

Credits

• Doug Niccum