Topic Documentation

You can embed your topic’s documentation into the Redpanda Console user interface by providing access to a GitHub repository that hosts your documentation files in Markdown format.

Integrating topic documentation into Redpanda Console

Redpanda Console clones the provided GitHub repository, recursively iterates through all directories in the repository (up to a max depth of 5) and stores all .md files it finds in memory. The "Documentation" tab in the frontend will show the markdown of the file matching the name of the Kafka topic.

Path/Filename Kafka Topic Name Matches

ordersv2.md

orders-v2

✗

Orders-v2.md

orders-v2

✗

orders-v2.md

orders-v2

✓

/orders/orders-v2.md

orders-v2

✓

Example

The following diagram shows an example of topic documentation in Redpanda Console:

Topic Documentation

Configuration

In addition to the repository URL and branch, you usually need to configure authentication credentials so that you can access private repositories. Redpanda Console supports SSH as well as basic auth. If neither is specified you could still pull publicly accessible repositories.

Following is the configuration:

console:
  topicDocumentation:
    enabled: true
    git:
      enabled: true
      repository:
        url: https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda-examples
        branch: main
        baseDirectory: console/topic-documentation
      # How often Console shall pull the repository to look for new files.
      # Set to 0 to disable periodic pulls
      refreshInterval: 1m
      # Basic Auth
      # If you want to use GitHub's personal access tokens use `token` as username
      # and pass the token as password
      basicAuth:
        enabled: false
        username: token
        password: ""
      # SSH Auth
      ssh:
        enabled: false
        username: ""
        privateKey: ""
        privateKeyFilepath: ""
        passphrase: ""