Web Fundamentals

Web Fundamentals is a technical documentation center for multi-device web development. Our goal is to build a resource for modern web developers that’s as curated and thorough as developer.android.com or iOS Dev Center.

Content plan

Content plan for Web Fundamentals is tracked through GitHub Issues and our Site Structure + Content Inventory doc

Release status

The project was soft launched in late April with a formal v1 launch in June 2014. We've now moved to a six-week rolling release cycle.

Technology

This is a Jekyll build.

/appengine - the server to host the static content
/src - the documentation
  /_langs - the content in each language
    /en - the base language folder
      /getting-started - the getting started articles
      /multi-device-layouts - responsive design guide
      /introduction-to-media - the guide to using media
      /optimizing-performance - the perf articles
      /using-touch - managing touch
      /showcase - the case-studies
      ...etc...
    /<langcode> - overrides for that language, following the main path structure.

The site is generated in /appengine/build, but is never checked in.

Contributing

Web Fundamentals is an open source project and we welcome your contributions! Before submitting a pull request, please review CONTRIBUTING.md and make sure that there is an issue filed describing the fix or new content. If you don't complete these steps, we won't be able to accept your pull request, sorry.

Installing Dependencies

Docker (recommended)

1. Download and install Docker for your platform.
2. Now it's installed check out the Running the site section for Docker below.

Note: Googlers - You may need to complete a few extra steps, ask for more details.

Mac

1. Install Xcode Command Line Tools
2. Install NVM
   • curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.23.3/install.sh | bash
3. Install node 0.10.x
   • nvm install 0.10
   • nvm use 0.10
4. Install RVM
   • curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash
5. Set RVM Default to 2.2.0
   • rvm install ruby-2.2.0
   • rvm --default use 2.2.0
6. Install Pygments
   • sudo easy_install pygments
7. Install RubyGems dependencies (Jekyll and Kramdown)
   • gem install bundler
   • rvm . do bundle install
8. Install the Grunt CLI
   • npm install -g grunt-cli
9. Install npm dependencies
   • npm install
10. Install fontforge if required for grunt-webfont on your OS. See grunt-webfont installation instructions for details.
11. Get the App Engine SDK and unzip into the google_appengine folder inside the project root. Add it to your path accordingly (in bash, $ PATH=./google_appengine:$PATH)

Note: On OSX, you may see an error about Warning: EMFILE, too many open files. If so you will need to increase the maximum number of open file handles.
Use ulimit -n 1024 to increase the maximum number of open files to 2048 from the default of 256, or add launchctl limit maxfiles 2048 2048 to .bashrc or .zshrc. See https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-watch#how-do-i-fix-the-error-emfile-too-many-opened-files for further details.

Note: On OSX, you may also see an error about Allow dev_appserver to check for updates on startup? (Y/n) and, many lines below it, EOFError: EOF when reading a line. If so you need to run dev_appserver once in a GAE project to allow dev_appserver to ask you about checking for updates. Choose whichever answer you like; this just clears the prompt for future runs of dev_appserver and you should be good to go.

Running the site

With Docker (recommended)

Prefixing a command with tools/docker.sh will run it inside the Docker container, which includes all the dependencies needed to build the site.

Build the project:

tools/docker.sh grunt build

Run a local dev server:

tools/docker.sh grunt develop

Then point your browser to http://localhost:8081/web/fundamentals or the IP address of your Docker instance

To build only a single language FASTER:

tools/docker.sh grunt develop --lang=en

Using boot2docker and Mac OS X

After running tools/docker.sh grunt develop, the Web Fundamentals website will be running on your local Docker instance. However, to view the website from a browser, you need to get the IP address of boot2docker (NOT your Docker instance):

$ boot2docker ip
192.168.59.103

From this IP you can access the website.

http://192.168.59.103:8081/web/fundamentals

Without Docker

Once you have all the dependencies installed go to the root of the checked out repo and type:

grunt develop

This will have Jekyll build the site, run a static server to listen on port 8081 (which you can now reach at http://localhost:8081/web/fundamentals/), and watch for changes to site files. Every change will cause Jekyll to rebuild the affected files.

If you want to build a single language then run this: grunt develop --lang=en.

Using project-level meta data

The table of contents is generated from src/_project.yaml

To parse the _project.yaml file, include {% injectdata content _project.yaml %} in the page. You then have access to the variables in the page object.

Generating Table of Contents

The table of contents is generated from src/_book.yaml

To parse the _book.yaml file, include {% injectdata content _book.yaml %} in the page and then iterate as follows:

 {% for section in page.content.toc %}
    SOME MARKUP
 {% endfor %}

Jekyll Special elements

• Code import: {% highlight javascript %} {% include sample1.js %} {% endhighlight %}
• {{ articles _category_}} a list of articles in divs, ordered by the "order" preamble.
• {{ showcases _category_}} a list of showcases.

Translations

See our translations guide