Back your Zendesk Help Center in git. Modify articles locally, and deploy directly to Zendesk.
Goals of this project:
- Back Help Center locally (via git), not Zendesk
- Give revision control of articles
- Reviewing article edits/changes made simpler
- Platform flexibility to be able to switch away from Zendesk
Note: Images will be backed by Amazon S3 so you will need an AWS account for the images to no longer be owned by Zendesk. Otherwise, you can leave images backed on Zendesk and comment out all scripts that involve S3.
-
Python 2.7
-
Add environment variables:
- Cloudfront URL:
ZENDESK_CLOUDFRONT_URL
- Zendesk subdomain:
ZENDESK_SUBDOMAIN
- Zendesk agent username:
ZENDESK_USR
- Zendesk agent password:
ZENDESK_PWD
- Zendesk AWS bucket name:
ZENDESK_BUCKET_NAME
- AWS Access Key:
AWS_ACCESS_KEY
- AWS Secret Key:
AWS_SECRET_KEY
- Cloudfront URL:
Run pip install zendesk-help-center-backer
###Tracking Changes
Before locally editing articles and images, always run zendesk-track
.
This allows for local viewing of content. All local content is available in the
"out" folder. To quit zendesk-track
, type CTRL+C.
- Run
zendesk-new
with a Zendesk Section ID as the parameter. - Add the title to the file
title.html
. - Open the file
index.html
and write the article.- For images, enter:
img src="<image_name>"
with the appropriate file type at the end (png, jpg, jpeg, gif). - For links to other articles, enter:
a href="<article_id>"
with the ID of the article you want to link to inserted.
- For images, enter:
- Ensure
zendesk-track
is running. If it wasn't, run it now. - Once the article is complete, open the version of the article in the "out" folder for local viewing. This will provide a basic HTML view in your preferred browser.
- When you are ready to publish your changes, you have two options:
- To deploy a single article, run
zendesk-deploy <article_id>
. - To deploy all the articles, run
zendesk-deploy
with no parameters.
- To deploy a single article, run
- Commit all changes that you make in the "posts" folder to GitHub to ensure revision control and allow others to review your changes.
To edit past articles, simply edit the HTML files with zendesk-track
running. Local edits can be viewed in the "out" folder and use zendesk-deploy
as
outlined above to publish the edits. You must have Zendesk editing capabilities
for the article. The final version should also be commited to GitHub.
BSD 3-Clause, see accompanying LICENSE file.