Documenting Quick (Personal -> Public System)

In Automation for Knuckle Draggers I recommend documenting to learn to code, and in my focus framework I allude that documenting is a medium-focus activity.

This article aims to show a quick example of how I document while saving time, and editorialize later if necessary.

Documentation Strategy#

I do a simple personal -> public draft system.

The personal draft is just the minimal amount of notes needed at your current skill level.

We're trying to knock out a feature in one run to catch issues ahead of time.

Record only things you find important that aren't obvious to you.
Screenshot only things hard to reproduce efficiently.
Keep it in one file.
Use TODOs for good ideas later.

Personal Draft Example:

# Install Apache Procedure & Test
pacman -S apache
sudo systemctl start httpd
sudo systemctl enable httpd

will be blank with dir on.

<TODO: SCREENSHOT>

Add to root `/srv/http/index.html`

sudo vi /srv/http/index.html

verify show up http://localhost/ - Done

# Notes
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Apache_HTTP_Server

---

# Configuration Procedure
...

We will do our public draft in bulk once we're ready to stop our personal draft.

Include:

Rich media (Screenshots, images, graphs, flowcharts).
Use case / why / problem statement.
Expanded sections & article splitting.
Conditionals (issues, failures, warnings).
Prerequisites / state of installation (if necessary).

Be quick and add only what makes sense from the above, let people tell you what could help later.

Public Draft Example:

## What

We will be installing Apache2 (also known as `apache` or `httpd`) on Arch Linux.

## Prerequisites

Install `apache`

```bash
sudo pacman -Syu # If you haven't already updated your system
sudo pacman -S apache
```

We will need to enable Apache via Systemd:

```bash
sudo systemctl start httpd
sudo systemctl enable httpd
```

We should now see a webpage on our web browser: http://localhost

![](../assets/images/image-20251207120026.png)

## Modify Root

By default, Apache on Arch will display a blank directory page.

We can add pages to Apache by modifying `/srv/http/`.

Let's add a default index.html:

```bash
sudo nvim /src/http/index.html
```

We'll use a simple Hello World HTML page:

```html title="/src/http/index.html"
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>Hello, World!</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Hello World!</h1>
    <p>This is my first web page.</p>
</body>
</html>
```

Let's revisit our web server, which should now be our index.html: http://localhost

![](../assets/images/image-20251207121437.png)

You have successfully setup Apache and created a web page.

## Extra Notes

Arch Wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Apache_HTTP_Server

Summary#

Consider the following scenarios:

What if /srv/http/ was not the correct folder?
What if apache was deprecated and apache-fixed looked different?
What if our target audience is a pro team?
What if nginx is what we really needed?

Doing a personal draft mitigates time loss by pushing discovery first.

When we take risks early and document when features are complete, we learn more and save a whole lot of precious time.