[Doc] Move CONTRIBUTING to docs site

[russellb]

The CONTRIBUTING.md file has some good information for contributors.
It would be nice to have a place to organize additional documentation
aimed at contributors, so move this content over to the docs site to
seed a new docs/source/contributing directory.

Replace CONTRIBUTING.md with a link to the new home for this
content.

Signed-off-by: Russell Bryant [email protected]

[github-actions]

👋 Hi! Thank you for contributing to the vLLM project.
Just a reminder: PRs would not trigger full CI run by default. Instead, it would only run fastcheck CI which starts running only a small and essential subset of CI tests to quickly catch errors. You can run other CI tests on top of those by going to your fastcheck build on Buildkite UI (linked in the PR checks section) and unblock them. If you do not have permission to unblock, ping simon-mo or khluu to add you in our Buildkite org.

Once the PR is approved and ready to go, your PR reviewer(s) can run CI to test the changes comprehensively before merging.

To run CI, PR reviewers can do one of these:

• Add ready label to the PR
• Enable auto-merge.

🚀

[youkaichao]

maybe we can directly remove this file?

[russellb]

I thought about it, but it's really common to have this file, so keeping it as a pointer seemed harmless enough to me

[simon-mo]

Suggest moving this to first one inside Developer Documentation

[russellb]

@simon-mo I wasn't really sure what the desired scope of that section was. It mostly looks like Python API documentation with a target audience of people using vllm as a library.

and the Profiling vLLM page that does seem more aligned to the "contributing" section I was proposing here.

and then there's the Dockerfile page that I'm not sure really fits in either one.

in summary, we could have

• API Documentation -- targeted at people using vllm as a library
• Contributing -- targeted at people working on the vLLM source

and I wouldn't use "Developer Documentation" in either place, since that's a bit ambiguous between the two personas.

Finally, the last alternative I see would be to keep contributor information out of the docs site completely and keep it in its own directory to be browsed on github. That's another way to keep separation between the personas.

[russellb]

I just pushed another commit with the changes I proposed above.

• move profiling and dockerfile content to the new "Contributing" section
• rename "Developer Documentation" to "API Documentation"

[DarkLight1337]

I think we should also move the "vLLM Paged Attention", "Input Processing Pipeline" and "Adding a Multimodal Plugin" pages to "Contributing".

[russellb]

Thanks for highlighting those docs. I think this warrants a third section:

1. API Documentation - API reference documents, primarily aimed at those using vLLM as a library
2. Design - design docs, discussing how parts of vllm work (more technical)
3. Contributing - information on how to work with vllm as a developer and contributor (more policy and process oriented)

[russellb]

Thanks for highlighting those docs. I think this warrants a third section:

1. API Documentation - API reference documents, primarily aimed at those using vLLM as a library
2. Design - design docs, discussing how parts of vllm work (more technical)
3. Contributing - information on how to work with vllm as a developer and contributor (more policy and process oriented)

just finished organizing into these sections

[DarkLight1337]

LGTM now, thanks for reorganizing the docs!

Some future improvements to think about:

• Group the pages related to Installation and Deployment to avoid taking up so much space in the sidebar
• Reorganize the pages under Models (why are Engine Arguments / Performance and Tuning placed under there?)