The New Codeship Documentation

Over the last couple of months Codeship grew tremendously. We run more builds and deployments for a growing number of companies. We are always striving to make the setup on the Codeship a success for everyone, so thoroughly answering all support requests is really important for us. With the aforementioned growth our time invested into support increased a lot.

On the one hand we want to provide easy accessible information through our documentation and in app help and on the other hand it lets us focus more on specific support requests and on improving the product.

Have a look at our new documentation here.

Automated messages for common errors

One important improvement was our recent automated error messages feature. We often see typical error messages in the log and in our support requests. For these error messages we show you a support message. This helps all of our users get a quick feedback and therefore doesn’t require additional support from us.

For example in the following image you can see an error message that a ruby gem was potentially removed from rubygems. This immediately tells you what the problem is.

We’ve added several auto-detections of common error messages and will be adding more in the future.

But this was only a first step. We needed to overhaul our docs. Not just to bring in more and better documentation, but also to have a better workflow in place to build on them.

Navigating through the Documentation

On the left side you can see all the different support categories.

You can use the tags we add to every article to jump to other relevant articles or search through the documentation on the top search bar.

You can get an overview on all the languages, databases or other technologies we support. Of course we added some information on our setup, general system, frequently asked questions and specific deployment guides.

Middleman generates the static pages for our docs. These static pages are hosted on Amazon S3. We will publish a blog post soon that will go into the details of the technology and workflow for our docs.

Our docs are open source on our Github repository. Let us know if you think we can improve our documentation, find errors in them or have general tips. We’re always eager for feedback and of course also for pull requests.

Have a look at our new documentation here.

Conclusions

After focusing on our product and technology for a while we are now putting a lot more of our time into usability and general ease of use. Great support and an easy and quick way to get the information you truly need are an important part of this. Now that we have the technology in place to move quickly with our docs we will put a lot of time into this, so Codeship becomes even easier to use and simpler to understand. The new documentation will help you get the relevant information you need as quickly as possible.