When managing pipelines for large and complex repositories with multiple ‘Platforms’, each containing multiple apps and services, then the folder structure and variable strategy can be complicated. However, if this is done right, then the payoff for template reuse is dramatic.
Here, I outline my approach on the pipeline folder and YAML structure only. The variable structure allows for a full set of naming conventions to easily default across all your projects apps and delegate standards to organisation and platform levels. This, ideally, leaves only app specific configurations for your dev teams to manage and worry about.
This strategy rests on top of my general approach to structuring a mono-repository. For more details on that see Mono-repository folder structures.
Although you can print a single page of your wiki to a PDF using the browser, it’s problematic when you have a more complex structured multi-page wiki and you need to distribute or archive it as a single file.
Fortunately thanks to the great initiative by Max Melcher and his AzureDevOps.WikiPDFExport tool, combined with Richard Fennell’s WIKI PDF Export Tasks, we can not only produce pretty good multi-page PDF’s of our Wiki’s, but to also create a Pipeline to automate their production.
The documentation for both these tools is good, but I have included here some additional tips and more complete steps to quickly get your pipelines setup.
Pre-requirements
To follow the steps outlined below you will need to:
I create a local folder like C:\MyApps\AzureDevOps-Export-Wiki\ and drop the EXE there. Then I can execute all my command lines and see the outputs there too.
Assume we have an Azure DevOps (Azdo) project called ‘MyAzdoProject‘. This has a default code repository with the same name and once created, a wiki repository called ‘MyAzdoProject.wiki‘.
You can clone this Wiki repo by selecting the ‘Clone wiki’ from the Wiki menu.
In the code repository, I have created a folder called /resources/wiki-pdf-styles/ to hold the
Header HTML template file
Footer HTML template file
CSS Style Sheet
In the Wiki, we may have documentation for several Apps and each may have several sections such as Architecture, UX design, Requirements notes etc..
For this illustration I am only wanting to output the Architecture pages and subpages for App1. So everything below /App1/Architecture/** in the wiki.
The Resource Files
My resource files are as follows (name of the files include the apps ‘Short Code’ ‘app1’ so each app can have independent files):
body {
font-family: "Segoe UI Emoji", Tahoma, Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif;
font-size: 10pt;
}
h1 {
font-size: 25pt;
color: #521e59;
}
h2 {
font-size: 20pt;
color: #3b868d;
}
h3 {
font-size: 15pt;
color: #f39000;
}
h4 {
font-size: 12pt;
color: #ec644a;
}
img {
max-width: 100%;
max-height: 800px;
}
/* Workaround to add a cover page */
.toc {
page-break-after: always;
}
/* target a span with class title inside an h1 */
h1 span.title {
page-break-before: avoid !important;
page-break-after: always;
padding-top: 25%;
text-align: center;
font-size: 48px;
}
/* make tables have a grey border */
table {
border-collapse: collapse;
border: 1px solid #ccc;
}
/* make table cells have a grey border */
td,
th {
border: 1px solid #ccc;
padding: 5px;
}
The Command Line
You can manually run the azure-export-wiki.exe (download the latest from here Releases ยท MaxMelcher/AzureDevOps.WikiPDFExport (github.com)) locally on a clone of your wiki repository. This is useful not just to output the PDF, but also to quickly refine your customizations, such as, parameters, templates and CSS.
I have used the following parameters:
-p / –path
Path to the wiki folder. If not provided, the current folder of the executable is used.
-o / –output
The path to the export file including the filename, e.g. c:\output.pdf
–footer-template-path, –header-template-path
local path to the header and footer html files
–css
local path to the CSS file
–breakPage
Adds a page break for each wiki page/file
–pathToHeading
Adds a path to the heading of each page. This can be formatted in the CSS
–highight-code
Highlight code blocks using highligh.js
–globaltoc
This sets the title for a global Table of Contents. As you will see, I have used this, in combination with the CSS to add in a main header Title.
You can run and refine this command line locally and generate the output.
You can also do a lot more styling with the CSS than I have done and refine it to your requirements. Just use the –debug flag in the command line above and the intermediate HTML file is produced. You can then see all the classes that you can play with.
The Pipeline
I decided to create a YAML Pipeline Template, as I often have many apps and extensive wiki documentation. Printing the whole Wiki to a PDF is not feasible, and hits limitations, so I have a several pipelines to output distinct parts of the wiki structure.
The YAML Task Template (publish-wiki-to-pdf-cd-task-template.yml)
Everything in this template is parameterized to allow flexible usage. You can also set the defaults and simplify the consuming pipelines.
# Task template for generating the PDF from the Wiki
parameters:
- name: LocalWikiCloneFolder
displayName: The local path to clone the wiki repo to
type: string
default: '$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)\wikirepo'
- name: WikiRootExportPath
displayName: The path in the Wiki to export to PDF
type: string
- name: ProjectShortCode
displayName: The short code for the project. Used to pick up the custom headers and footers files
type: string
- name: CustomFilesPath
displayName: The local path to the custom files on the build agent in the main repo
type: string
default: '\resources\wiki-pdf-styles\**'
- name: PdfOutputFileName
displayName: The filename for the output pdf. Do not include the extension
type: string
default: '$(ProjectShortCode)-Wiki.pdf'
- name: WikiRepoUrl
displayName: The URL of the Wiki repo
type: string
default: 'https://myorg@dev.azure.com/myorg/MyAzdoProject/_git/MyAzdoProject.wiki'
- name: PdfTitleHeading
displayName: The title heading for the PDF
type: string
default: 'Nicholas Rogoff - $(ProjectShortCode) - Wiki'
steps:
- task: CopyFiles@2
displayName: Copy-Headers-Footers-Styles
inputs:
Contents: '$(CustomFilesPath)'
TargetFolder: '$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)\styles\'
OverWrite: true
enabled: false
- task: WikiPdfExportTask@3
displayName: Create-PDF
inputs:
cloneRepo: true
repo: '$(WikiRepoUrl)'
useAgentToken: true
localpath: '$(LocalWikiCloneFolder)'
rootExportPath: '$(WikiRootExportPath)'
outputFile: '$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)\$(PdfOutputFileName).pdf'
ExtraParameters: '--footer-template-path "$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)\resources\wiki-pdf-styles\footer-$(ProjectShortCode).html" --header-template-path "$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)\resources\wiki-pdf-styles\header-$(ProjectShortCode).html" --css "$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)\resources\wiki-pdf-styles\styles.css" --breakPage --pathToHeading --highlight-code --globaltoc "<span class=''title''>$(PdfTitleHeading)</span>" -v'
- task: PublishBuildArtifacts@1
displayName: Publish-Artifact
inputs:
PathtoPublish: '$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)\$(PdfOutputFileName).pdf'
ArtifactName: 'drop'
publishLocation: 'Container'
The main pipeline
# Publishes the wiki to PDFs
trigger:
- none
pr: none
# schedules:
# - cron: "0 0 * * *"
# displayName: Daily midnight wiki publish
# branches:
# include:
# - main
# always: true
pool:
vmImage: windows-latest
# Setting the build number to the date as work-around to include in the Title as $(Build.BuildNumber)
name: $(Date:yyyy-MM-dd)
variables:
- name: projectShortCode
value: 'app1'
- name: localWikiCloneFolder
value: '$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)\wikirepo'
- name: wikiRootExportPath
value: '$(localWikiCloneFolder)\MyAzdoProject\Projects\CDH-UI\Architecture'
- name: customFilesPath
value: '\resources\wiki-pdf-styles\**'
- name: wikiRepoUrl
value: 'https://myorg@dev.azure.com/m/MyorgyAzdoProject/_git/MyAzdoProject.wiki'
- name: pdfOutputFilename
value: '$(ProjectShortCode)-Architecture-Wiki.pdf'
- name: pdfTitleHeading
value: 'Nicholas Rogoff - $(ProjectShortCode) - Architecture Wiki $(Build.BuildNumber)'
steps:
- template: './templates/publish-wiki-to-pdf-cd-task-template.yml'
parameters:
LocalWikiCloneFolder: $(localWikiCloneFolder)
WikiRootExportPath: '$(wikiRootExportPath)'
ProjectShortCode: '$(projectShortCode)'
CustomFilesPath: '$(customFilesPath)'
PdfOutputFileName: '$(pdfOutputFilename)'
WikiRepoUrl: '$(wikiRepoUrl)'
PdfTitleHeading: '$(pdfTitleHeading)'
I have left in some running options here. The default is completely manual, but I have added for reference, commented out, the format for a scheduled operation, as well as on every change (not recommended).
I have also used the ‘name:’ (which is referenced as $(Build.BuildNumber)), to create a date in a format I wanted for the Header page.
When this pipeline runs the PDF artifact can be downloaded. You can obviously add a new step to copy the file to any destination that suits your requirements.
