Style guide

Content best practices

Best practice	✅ Do	❌ Don’t
Use US English (not British English)	The response should look like…	The response shall look like…
	In the previous section, you learned…	In the previous section, you learnt…
	Color, recognize, analyze	Colour, recognise, analyse
	While	Whilst
Use present tense	This `command` starts a proxy.	This `command` will start a proxy.
Use active voice	You can explore the API using a browser.	The API can be explored using a browser.
	The YAML file specifies the replica count.	The replica count is specified in the YAML file.
Use conversational tone	Run the program.	Execute the program.
	Use the Admin API.	Utilize the Admin API.
	Open the link to do the thing.	Open the link in order to do the thing.
Don’t use Latin phrases	For example, …	e.g., …
	That is, …	i.e., …
Avoid generic pronouns	Once you have added the inputs section, …	Once you have added this, …
Don’t use displays or appears	Do the thing.	In the blank that appears, do the thing.
Use descriptive headings	Improve Vitals performance with InfluxDB	Overview
	Query frequency and precision	Query behavior
Use sentence case for headings	Understanding traffic flow in Kong Gateway	Understanding Traffic Flow in Kong Gateway
Use descriptive link titles instead of “click here”	For more information, see the style guide.	For more information, click here.
	Learn about content best practices in the Kong style guide.	Learn about content best practices here.

Formatting standards

Automatic formatting

Prettier is used to format all prose and code files. There are three ways to meet this standard:

Install the Prettier plugin for your editor
Run npx prettier --write ./your/edited/files.md in the terminal
(Maintainers only) Add the ci:autofix:prettier label to a Pull Request

All files in app/_src are formatted with Prettier. Prose in app has not been bulk-formatted and may be formatted as you edit those files

Content types

At Kong, we use the four following standard content types when we write our documentation:

Explanation: Documentation that is understanding-oriented because it clarifies and discusses a particular topic.
How-to: Documentation that is goal-oriented and prescriptive and that takes readers through the steps to complete a real-world problem.
Reference: Documentation that explains the technology, like API or command line documentation.
Tutorial: Documentation that helps users learn about a topic by going step-by-step through a series of tasks.

Every documentation page should fit one of these four content types.

Punctuation rules

Commas and periods always go inside quotation marks, and colons and semicolons (dashes as well) go outside.
- For example: “There was a storm last night,” Paul said.

List punctuation

✅ Do use punctuation when constructing lists that contain full sentences:

In DB-less mode, you configure Kong Gateway declaratively. Therefore, the Admin API is mostly read-only. The only tasks it can perform are all related to handling the declarative configuration, including:

Setting a target’s health status in the load balancer.

Validating configurations against schemas.

Uploading the declarative configuration using the /config endpoint.

❌ Don’t use punctuation when creating ordered and unordered lists that are extensions of a sentence:

Kong Mesh enables the microservices transformation with:

Out-of-the-box service connectivity and discovery

Zero-trust security

Traffic reliability

Global observability across all traffic

Placeholder and example values

The type of placeholder you use depends on context:

Generic placeholder values: In most situations (such as plugin parameters, YAML examples, or Kong configuration), use all caps text and underscores between words.

For example: service: SERVICE_NAME
Placeholders in API URLs or OpenAPI specs: Enclose placeholders in { } characters and write them in all caps, per Swagger guidelines.

For example: /services/{SERVICE_NAME|ID}/plugins
Hostnames and example URLs:
- For guides with examples that are intended to be runnable as-is, use localhost as the domain name.
  
  For example: curl -i -X https://localhost:8001/services
  
  If you are following a guide where Kong Gateway is running on localhost, this example can be copied and pasted straight into a terminal. It should work with no changes.
- For situations where you need a generic domain name and the examples are illustrative only (not intended to be runnable as-is), use example or example.com.
  
  For example: user@example.com or https://example.okta.admin.com
Path parameters
- Path parameters must be denoted with curly braces {}.
  
  For example: http://localhost:8001/services/{service_id_or_name}/routes/{route_id_or_name}

Inline placeholders

If you’re adding a placeholder inline, such as in a sentence, enclose it in single backticks: `EXAMPLE_TEXT`

Capitalization guidelines

Follow the user interface (UI). If a term is capitalized in the UI and you are referring to the specific UI element, it should be capitalized in the documentation.

Don’t capitalize the following terms:

application
certificate
consumer
control plane
database
data plane
developer
hybrid mode
plugin
route
service
service mesh
target
upstream

Plugin names

Capitalize the plugin name but not the word plugin. For example, “Rate Limiting plugin”.
Don’t capitalize the name if you’re using it in code. For example, rate-limiting.
Don’t capitalize if you’re referring to the concept, not the plugin. For example, “Set up rate limiting in Kong Gateway with the Rate Limiting plugin”.

Kong-specific terms

For product and component names, see Word Choice.

Object/entity names (for example, service, route, upstream) should be lowercase.

Code formatting

Separate commands from output.
Include properly formatted code comments.
For long commands, split the code block into separate lines with \ to avoid horizontal scrolling.
Never have more than one command in a block/example.
Set a language for code blocks, for example, bash, to enable syntax highlighting.
- List of supported languages
Do NOT use the command prompt marker ($) in code snippets.

Icons

When deciding which icon to use for a doc, use the following guidelines:

Is there a Unicode version?

We use Unicode for common icons such as ✅ and ❌ . You can copy and paste a Unicode icon directly into markdown.
Is there a Font Awesome icon?

We also use the free version of Font Awesome to supplement Unicode icons. Check out their catalog to find an icon code, then see our icon usage instructions.
Does the /_assets/images/icons/ folder contain the icon that you’re looking for?

For custom icons, we have to import them manually. This includes all of the icons used in docs navigation and all icons that are used for UI labels in Konnect and Kong’s UIs. If you find one, see our icon usage instructions.
If the answer to all of the above is “no”, you can upload a custom image.

Reference style guide

Follow Kong’s style guide whenever possible. However, we recommend using the Google developer style guide for style and formatting cases that our guide doesn’t cover.