Shortcut to build asciidocs

CONTRIBUTING.md

@@ -29,6 +29,7 @@ A high level overview of our contributing guidelines.
     - [Running Browser Automation Tests](#running-browser-automation-tests)
       - [Browser Automation Notes](#browser-automation-notes)
   - [Building OS packages](#building-os-packages)
+  - [Writing documentation](#writing-documentation)
 - [Signing the contributor license agreement](#signing-the-contributor-license-agreement)
 - [Submitting a Pull Request](#submitting-a-pull-request)
 - [Code Reviewing](#code-reviewing)
@@ -362,6 +363,21 @@ npm run build -- --rpm
 
 Distributable packages can be found in `target/` after the build completes.
 
+### Writing documentation
+
+Kibana documentation is written in [asciidoc](http://asciidoc.org/) format in
+the `docs/` directory.
+
+To build the docs, you must clone the [elastic/docs](https://github.com/elastic/docs)
+repo as a sibling of your kibana repo. Follow the instructions in that project's
+README for getting the docs tooling set up.
+
+**To build the docs and open them in your browser:**
+
+```bash
+node scripts/docs.js --open
+```
+
 ## Signing the contributor license agreement
 
 Please make sure you have signed the [Contributor License Agreement](http://www.elastic.co/contributor-agreement/). We are not asking you to assign copyright to us, but to give us the right to distribute your code without restriction. We ask this of all contributors in order to assure our users of the origin and continuing existence of the code. You only need to sign the CLA once.

scripts/docs.js

@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+require('../src/optimize/babel/register');
+require('../src/docs/cli');

src/docs/cli.js

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+import { execFileSync } from 'child_process';
+import { resolve } from 'path';
+
+const kibanaDir = resolve(__dirname, '..', '..');
+const docsIndexFile = resolve(kibanaDir, 'docs', 'index.asciidoc');
+const docsToolDir = resolve(kibanaDir, '..', 'docs');
+const docsToolCmd = resolve(docsToolDir, 'build_docs.pl');
+
+const args = process.argv.slice(2);
+
+try {
+  execFileSync(docsToolCmd, ['--doc', docsIndexFile, '--chunk=1', ...args]);
+} catch (err) {
+  if (err.code === 'ENOENT') {
+    console.error(`elastic/docs repo must be cloned to ${docsToolDir}`);
+  } else {
+    console.error(err.stack);
+  }
+
+  process.exit(1);
+}