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Add a Readme to document your apps for others

Patterns apps are extremely powerful and can be full of complexity. Sometimes, the complexity of an app make it hard to understand what's going on. You can add a top-level readme to an app to describe how the app works. You can also make references and link to nodes so that you can refer directly to specific nodes in your readme. Look at this app below for an example, alternatively open it full-screen here.

Adding a description_file to graph.yml​

In order for a readme to render, you must first add a description_file to your graph.yml like this:

graph.yml
description_file: readme.md
functions:
- chart_input: output_table
  display:
    height: 2
    width: 3
    x: 4
    y: 1
...

Write up a readme.md, referencing and linking to nodes​

Add a new readme.md file to your project that uses standard markdown. To link to nodes, enter a semi-colon : and a menu will appear to select a node and inject it's title into your readme. This is the exact readme for the above example.

readme.md
# Getting Started Tutorial

Patterns lets you quickly build apps that ingest data from any sort of API or database, store data in tables, process it with Python and SQL, build interactive charts and dashboards, and serve data to external APIs or databases. This written guide mirrors the in-app guided tutorial where you learn to build an app that monitors Hacker News comments for keywords, visualizes data, and sends alerts to Slack. In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to:

1. :Node{#ofrsqawf} with the Hacker News [Firebase API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)
2. Write a SQL node, :Node{#ekdmipzu} to aggregate comments by minute
3. Visualize comment timeseries data in a chart, :Node{#6s2fdrd3}, that leveraged the [Vegalite](https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/) library to describe your charts.
4. Write a Python node to :Node{#plrhtg4w} in comment text
5. :Node{#rtn3fmo2} with a Slack Component cloned from the Marketplace to post messages to a channel (needs configuration)