CMS Design System

The design system is a set of open source design and front-end development resources for creating Section 508 compliant, responsive, and consistent websites. It builds on the U.S. Web Design System and extends it to support additional CSS and React components, utility classes, and a grid framework to allow teams to quickly prototype and build accessible, responsive, production-ready websites.

Contents

• Packages
• Running locally
  • Getting started
  • Scripts
  • Visual regression testing
• Design assets
• Examples
• Contributing
• Contact

Packages

You're currently at the root of a monorepo containing multiple NPM packages located in the packages directory. Unless you're a contributor or a child design system maintainer, you can ignore the @cmsgov/design-system-docs and @cmsgov/design-system-scripts packages, as they are mostly focused on the design system's developer tooling and documentation. View the README.md in each of these for additional details.

Name	Description
CMS Design System	The core CSS, JS, and React components for the design system.
Design System Documentation	Markdown files containing documentation for the core design system site. These files are used by @cmsgov/design-system-scripts to generate our documentation site.
Design System Scripts	Scripts for compiling, testing, and linting design system assets. Also contains scripts for building and serving the documentation site. This is used internally by the core CMS design system team, but is made public for child design systems.
Healthcare.gov Design System	Design system used by application teams at healthcare.gov
Medicare.gov Design System	Design system used by application teams at medicare.gov

Running locally

This project uses Yarn for package management. Yarn helps to ensure everyone is using the same package versions. Install Yarn, if you don't have it yet.

Getting started

1. yarn install
   • This will also run Lerna bootstrap which allows us to have multiple packages within the same repo (a monorepo). Lerna installs all our dependencies and symlinks any cross-dependencies.
2. yarn start

Note: When you create a Git commit, any staged scripts will be automatically ran through ESLint and Prettier. If the linter catches an error, your commit will fail. This is a feature, not a bug :)

Scripts

These scripts can all be run from the root level of the repo:

• yarn start
  • Starts local server running the documentation site
  • Regenerates documentation when files change
  • yarn start:healthcare to start the Healthcare.gov Design System's documentation site
  • yarn start:medicare to start the Medicare.gov Design System's documentation site
• yarn build
  • Compile/transpile/uglify everything and makes things release-ready.
  • yarn build:healthcare to build the Healthcare.gov Design System
  • yarn build:medicare to build the Medicare.gov Design System
• yarn build-docs
  • Build the design system and the documentation site
  • yarn build-docs:healthcare to build the Healthcare.gov Design System docs site
  • yarn build-docs:medicare to build the Medicare.gov Design System docs site
• yarn storybook
  • Starts storybook for easier local development for the core package
  • yarn storybook:healthcare starts storybook for healthcare stories & styles
  • yarn storybook:medicare starts storybook for medicare stories & styles
• yarn test
  • Runs JS unit tests
  • Runs Prettier for formatting
  • Lints JS using ESLint
  • Lints Sass using stylelint
• yarn test:unit
  • Runs JS unit tests for all packages
• yarn test:a11y
  • Runs accessibility tests for design-system package only
  • yarn test:a11y:healthcare to run the Healthcare.gov Design System's accessibility tests
  • yarn test:a11y:medicare to run the Medicare.gov Design System's accessibility tests
• yarn update-snapshots
  • Updates Jest snapshots
• yarn lint
  • Runs just the linting portion of the tests
• yarn release
  • Bumps package versions and tags a release commit. Read our Release Process guide for more info.
• yarn publish-release
  • Publishes npm packages. Read our Release Process guide for more info.

Visual regression testing

In addition to unit and a11y tests, we're using backstopJS for visual regression testing. Here's how to run the tests.

• Install backstopJS yarn install
• Run the site locally yarn start
• In a new terminal window run the backstop tests backstop test
  • This will test the local CMSDS documentation site against the CMSDS production documentation site
• After the tests run an html report will open in your browser showing passed and failed tests
• When introducing a visual change, run backstop approve to commit new reference files after confirming the change with backstop test

Note: Use backstop reference to update and replace all reference files.

Design Assets

The CMS Design System provides a Sketch file and Sketch Library containing components, styles, and symbols. These are regularly updated alongside our code, and updates are automatically synced for designers using the Sketch Library.

Read more on using Sketch with the CMS Design System

Examples

Examples of the design system in use can be found in the examples directory.

Contributing

Please read the CONTRIBUTING.md document to learn about contributing to the design system, and our coding guidelines.

Contact

To contact the CMS Design System product owners, please email [email protected]

One of our goals is to ensure a welcoming environment for all contributors. Please take a look at our Code of Conduct to learn more.