Yari

Quickstart

Development on yari involves updating the machinery that renders MDN content or improving the structure and styling of the MDN UI (e.g. the styling of the header). If you are more interested in contributing to the MDN content, you should check out the content repo README instead.

Before you can start working with Yari, you need to:

1. Install git, Node.js (>= 12.0.0), and Yarn 1.

2. Fork the MDN content and yari repositories using the Fork button on GitHub.

3. Clone the forked repositories to your computer using the following commands (replace [your account] with the account you forked the repositories to):

       git clone https://github.com/[your_account]/content.git
       git clone https://github.com/[your_account]/yari.git
   
   Take a note of the file path to the location where you've cloned that
   repo before moving on.
   

To run Yari locally, you'll first need to install its dependencies and build the app locally. Do this like so:

cd yari
yarn install

Now run the following command to create a .env file inside your yari repo root and set the CONTENT_ROOT environment variable equal to the path to the content repo. This is so the Yari app can find the content it needs to render. You'll need to replace /path/to/mdn/content/files with the path to the /files folder inside your clone of the content repo:

echo CONTENT_ROOT=/path/to/mdn/content/files >> .env

At this point, you can get started. Run the following lines to compile required files, start the Yari web server running, and open it in your browser:

yarn dev
open http://localhost:3000

If you prefer you can use yarn start, which will re-use any previously compiled files; this is "riskier" but faster. yarn dev always ensures that everything is up-to-date.

The yarn start command also starts a server with slightly different behavior — it doesn't automatically reload when its source code files change, so use with caution.

See also our reviewing guide for information on how to review Yari changes.

How to stay up-to-date

Periodically, the code and the content changes. Make sure you stay up-to-date with something along the following lines (replace yari-origin with whatever you called the remote location of the original yari repo):

git pull yari-origin main
yarn
yarn dev

When you embark on making a change, do it on a new branch, for example git checkout -b my-new-branch.

License

All source code is MPL-2.0.

For content, see its license in the mdn/content repository.

How it works

Yari does a number of things, the most important of which is to render and serve the MDN content found in the content repo. Each document is stored as an index.html file that contains metadata presented as YAML front-matter followed by the document source.

The builder converts these "source files" into "build files" using a CLI tool that iterates over the files, builds the HTML, and lastly packages it up with the front-end code, ready to be served as static files.

Development

The yarn start command encapsulates the front-end dev server (on http://localhost:3000) and the server (on http://localhost:5000).

All the sub-commands of yarn start can be broken down and run individually if you want to work more rapidly.

Setting up $EDITOR

If you configure an environment variable called EDITOR, either on your system as a whole or in the root .env file, it can be used in the development server to link to sources which, when clicked, open in your preferred editor/IDE. For example, in the root of the repo you could run:

echo 'EDITOR=code' >> .env

Now clicking certain links will open files directly in the currently open VS Code IDE (replace code in the above command with a different text editor name if needed, e.g. atom or whatever). To test it, view any document on http://localhost:3000 and click the "Open in your editor" button.

How the server works

The server has two main jobs:

1. Simulate serving the site (e.g. from a server, S3 or a CDN).
2. Trigger builds of documents that haven't been built, by URL.

Linting

All JavaScript and TypeScript code needs to be formatted with prettier and it's easy to test this with:

yarn prettier-check

And conveniently, if you're not even interested in what the flaws were, run:

yarn prettier-format

When you ran yarn for the first time (yarn is an alias for yarn install) it automatically sets up a git pre-commit hook that uses pretty-quick — a wrapper for prettier that checks only the files in the git commit.

If you have doubts about formatting, submit your pull request anyway. If you have formatting flaws, the pull request checks should catch it.

Upgrading Packages

We maintain the dependencies using Dependabot in GitHub but if you want to manually upgrade them you can use:

yarn upgrade-interactive --latest

Sharing your dev environment with ngrok

ngrok allows you to start an HTTP proxy server from the web into your Yari server. This can be useful for testing your current build using external tools like BrowserStack, WebPageTest, or Google Translate, or to simply show a friend what you're up to. Obviously it'll never be faster than your uplink Internet connection but it should be fairly feature-complete.

1. Create in account on Ngrok.com
2. Download the executable
3. Start your Yari server with yarn start in one terminal
4. Start the ngrok executable with: /path/to/your/ngrok http 5000

This will display something like this:

Session Status                online
Account                       (Plan: Free)
Version                       2.3.35
Region                        United States (us)
Web Interface                 http://127.0.0.1:4040
Forwarding                    http://920ba2108da8.ngrok.io -> http://localhost:5000
Forwarding                    https://920ba2108da8.ngrok.io -> http://localhost:5000

Connections                   ttl     opn     rt1     rt5     p50     p90
                              0       0       0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00

Now, take that "Forwarding" URL (https://920ba2108da8.ngrok.io in this example) and share it.

Building

The server builds content automatically (on-the-fly) when you're viewing pages, but you can pre-emptively build all the content in advance if desired. One potential advantage is that you can get a more complete list of all possible "flaws" across all documents before you even visit them.

The most fundamental CLI command is:

yarn build

What gets built

Every index.html becomes two files:

• index.html — a fully formed and complete HTML file
• index.json — the state information React needs to build the page in the client

Flaw checks

When building you can enable specific "flaw checks" and their level of handling. Some flaws are "cosmetic" and some are more severe but they should never block a full build.

More information about how to set flaws can be found in docs/envvars.md.

Essentially, the default is to warn about any flaw and you can see those flaws when using http://localhost:3000. For completed builds, all flaws are ignored. This makes the build faster and there's also no good place to display the flaws in a production-grade build.

In the future, we might make the default flaw level error instead. That means that any new edits to (or creation of) any document will break in continuous integration if there's a single flaw and the onus will be on you to fix it.

Icons and logos

The various formats and sizes of the favicon are generated from the file mdn-web-docs.svg in the repository root. This file is then converted to favicons using realfavicongenerator.net. To generate new favicons, edit or replace the mdn-web-docs.svg file and then re-upload that to realfavicongenerator.net.

Troubleshooting

Some common issues and how to resolve them.

Error: ENOSPC: System limit for number of file watchers reached

There are two options to resolve this.

1. Disable the watcher via REACT_APP_NO_WATCHER

   echo REACT_APP_NO_WATCHER=true >> .env

2. Increase max_user_watches:
   See https://github.com/guard/listen#increasing-the-amount-of-inotify-watchers

Error: Cannot find module 'levenary'

We can't know for sure what's causing this error but speculate a bug in how yarn fails to resolve if certain @babel helper libs should install its own sub-dependencies. A sure way to solve it is to run:

rm -fr node_modules
yarn install

Error: listen EADDRINUSE: address already in use :::5000

The default server port :5000 might be in use by another process. To resolve this, you can pick any unused port (e.g., 6000) and run the following:

echo SERVER_PORT=6000 >> .env