automation-tests/docs/source/markdown/options

Common Man Page Options

This subdirectory contains option (flag) names and descriptions common to multiple podman man pages. Each file is one option. The filename does not necessarily need to be identical to the option name: for instance, hostname.container.md and hostname.pod.md exist because the --hostname option is sufficiently different between podman-{create,run} and podman-pod-{create,run} to warrant living separately.

How

The files here are included in podman-*.md.in files using the @@option mechanism:

@@option foo           ! includes options/foo.md

The tool that does this is hack/markdown-preprocess. It is a python script because it needs to run on readthedocs.io. From a given .md.in file, this script creates a .md file that can then be read by go-md2man, sphinx, anything that groks markdown. This runs as part of make docs.

Special Substitutions

Some options are almost identical except for 'pod' vs 'container' differences. For those, use <<text for pods|text for containers>>. Order is immaterial: the important thing is the presence of the string "pod" in one half but not the other. The correct string is chosen based on the filename: if the file contains -pod, such as podman-pod-create, the string with pod (case-insensitive) in it is chosen.

The string <<subcommand>> is replaced with the podman subcommand as determined from the filename, e.g., create for podman-create.1.md.in. This allows the shared use of examples in the option file:

    Example: podman <<subcommand>> --foo --bar

As a special case, podman-pod-X becomes just X (the "pod" is removed). This makes the pod-id-file man page more useful. To get the full subcommand including 'pod', use <<fullsubcommand>>.

Restrictions

There is a restriction for having a single text line with three back-ticks in the front and the end of the line. For instance:

```Some man page text```

This is currently not allowed and causes a corruption of the compiled man page. Instead, put the three back-ticks on separate lines like:

``` Some man page text ```