vjeux / docs

learn you some npm for great good

docs.npmjs.com

Learn you some npm for great good.

Editing Content

All the markdown files can be found in the content directory. Some of these files live here in this repository, others live in other repositories and are imported during the build process. These imported files are ignored by git to prevent people from accidentally editing the wrong files.

In this repo

• Getting Started
• How npm Works
• Private Modules
• Organizations

Copied from npm/npm

• CLI commands
• Configuring npm
• Using npm

HTML Frontmatter for Page Metadata

This site uses html-frontmatter to add metadata to pages.

title

If a file has a title property in its frontmatter, it will be used for the <title> of the rendered HTML page. If title is absent from the frontmatter, the filename (without the .md extension) is used.

order

Pages are sorted alphabetically by default, but the page order per section can be overridden by using a numerical order frontmatter property. It is not necessary to order all pages in a section: Any pages in a section that don't have an order property will be relegated to the end of that section.

Redirects

If you rename or remove a file, add it to lib/redirects.js to keep things from breaking.

Sections

If you rename a directory inside the content directory, you'll need to change it in sections.json to allow the content.json to pick up the changes.

Development

Download Node at nodejs.org and install it, if you haven't already.

To run the app locally:

npm install
npm run dev

Now you have a server running nodemon at localhost:5000.

NOTE: If you are using iojs, or Node versions 4 or 5 on a Linux or OSX box, you will need to do the following steps:

$ sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
$ sudo apt-get update -qq
$ sudo apt-get install -qq -y g++-4.8
$ sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.8 50

NOTE: If you have changed Node.js versions and are still getting and error on a supported version of Node.js, you may need to rebuild npm:

$ npm rebuild

The Build Process

The build is run automatically after every npm install and before npm start. Here's an overview of what it does:

1. Copies npm documentation from ./node_modules/npm/doc to ./content.
2. Walks the content directory collecting markdown files.
3. Reads the contents of each markdown file.
4. Parses HTML Frontmatter from the markdown files.
5. Converts markdown to HTML.
6. Writes content.json with HTML content of each file included.

The copied and generated files are ignored for two reasons:

1. Keeps the git history uncluttered.
2. Prevents humans from accidentally editing auto-generated files.

Webservice

The content.json file is served publicly at /content.json with CORS support, allowing browsers on other domains to fetch all the npm documentation and accompanying metadata with a single HTTP call.

Tests

npm install
npm test

Deployment

git push origin +master:deploy-staging
git push origin +master:deploy-production

If you get dissed with an "Everything up-to-date" message, make an empty commit and push again:

git commit -avm "emptiness" --allow-empty