Antora Default UI

This project is an archetype that demonstrates how to produce a UI bundle that can be used by Antora to generated a documentation site. You can see a preview of the default UI at antora.gitlab.io/antora-ui-default.

While the default UI is ready to be used with Antora, the intent is that you’ll fork it and customize it for your own needs. It’s intentionally minimalistic so as to give you a good starting point without requiring too much effort to customize.

Use the Default UI

If you want to simply use the default UI for your Antora-generated site, add the following UI configuration to your playbook:

ui:
  bundle:
    url: https://gitlab.com/antora/antora-ui-default/-/jobs/artifacts/master/raw/build/ui-bundle.zip?job=bundle-stable
    snapshot: true

Note	The snapshot flag tells Antora to fetch the UI when the --fetch command-line flag is present. This setting is required because updates to the UI bundle are pushed to the same URL. If the URL were to be unique, this setting would not be required.

Read on to learn how to custom the default UI for your own documentation.

Development Quickstart

This section offers a basic tutorial to teach you how to set up the default UI project, preview it locally, and bundle it for use with Antora. A more comprehensive can be found in the documentation at docs.antora.org.

Prerequisites

To preview and bundle the default UI, you need the following software on your computer:

• git (command: git)

• Node.js (command: node)

• Gulp CLI (command: gulp)

git

First, make sure you have git installed.

$ git --version

If not, download and install the git package for your system.

Node.js

Next, make sure that you have Node.js installed.

$ node --version

If this command fails with an error, you don’t have Node.js installed. If the command doesn’t report an LTS version of Node.js (e.g., v10.15.3), it means you don’t have a suitable version of Node.js installed. In this guide, we’ll be installing Node.js 10.

While you can install Node.js from the official packages, we strongly recommend that you use nvm (Node Version Manager) to manage your Node.js installation(s). Follow the nvm installation instructions to set up nvm on your machine.

Once you’ve installed nvm, open a new terminal and install Node.js 10 using the following command:

$ nvm install 10

You can switch to this version of Node.js at any time using the following command:

$ nvm use 10

To make Node.js 10 the default in new terminals, type:

$ nvm alias default 10

Now that you have Node.js installed, you can proceed with installing the Gulp CLI.

Gulp CLI

You’ll need the Gulp command-line interface (CLI) to run the build. The Gulp CLI package provides the gulp command which, in turn, executes the version of Gulp declared by the project.

You should install the Gulp CLI globally (which resolves to a location in your user directory if you’re using nvm) using the following command:

$ npm install -g gulp-cli

Verify the Gulp CLI is installed and on your PATH by running:

$ gulp --version

Tip	If you prefer to install global packages using Yarn, run this command instead: $ yarn global add gulp-cli

Now that you have the prerequisites installed, you can fetch and build the UI project.

Clone and Initialize the UI Project

Clone the default UI project using git:

$ git clone https://gitlab.com/antora/antora-ui-default &&
  cd "`basename $_`"

The example above clones Antora’s default UI project and then switches to the project folder on your filesystem. Stay in this project folder when executing all subsequent commands.

Use npm to install the project’s dependencies inside the project. In your terminal, execute the following command:

$ npm install

This command installs the dependencies listed in package.json into the node_modules/ folder inside the project. This folder does not get included in the UI bundle and should not be committed to the source control repository.

Tip	If you prefer to install packages using Yarn, run this command instead: $ yarn

Preview the UI

The default UI project is configured to preview offline. The files in the preview-src/ folder provide the sample content that allow you to see the UI in action. In this folder, you’ll primarily find pages written in AsciiDoc. These pages provide a representative sample and kitchen sink of content from the real site.

To build the UI and preview it in a local web server, run the preview command:

$ gulp preview

You’ll see a URL listed in the output of this command:

[12:00:00] Starting server...
[12:00:00] Server started http://localhost:5252
[12:00:00] Running server

Navigate to this URL to preview the site locally.

While this command is running, any changes you make to the source files will be instantly reflected in the browser. This works by monitoring the project for changes, running the preview:build task if a change is detected, and sending the updates to the browser.

Press Ctrl+C to stop the preview server and end the continuous build.

Package for Use with Antora

If you need to package the UI so you can use it to generate the documentation site locally, run the following command:

$ gulp bundle

If any errors are reported by lint, you’ll need to fix them.

When the command completes successfully, the UI bundle will be available at build/ui-bundle.zip. You can point Antora at this bundle using the --ui-bundle-url command-line option.

If you have the preview running, and you want to bundle without causing the preview to be clobbered, use:

$ gulp bundle:pack

The UI bundle will again be available at build/ui-bundle.zip.

Copyright and License

Copyright © 2017-2019 OpenDevise Inc. and the Antora Project.

Use of this software is granted under the terms of the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0 (MPL-2.0). See LICENSE to find the full license text.

Authors

Development of Antora is led and sponsored by OpenDevise Inc.