Forem Developer Docs

Welcome to Forem's developer documentation! The docs are built using Docusaurus 2, a React and Markdown based documentation website generator.

Our developer docs are meant to be used as a way to find instructions to setup a local instance of Forem, documentation on the architecture of Forem, how to contribute, and many other useful documents.

If you have launched a Forem community of your own and are looking for documentation on how to manage that community, please see our Admin Docs

Technical Overview

Most of the configuration here is not too different from the basic preset-classic of Docusaurus. The main folders are:

• docs: where the documentation lives
• src: any custom CSS, components or pages
• static/img: any image files

Installation

git clone https://github.com/forem/forem-docs.git
yarn install

Local Development

Once installed:

yarn start

This command starts a local development server and opens up a browser window. Most changes are reflected live without having to restart the server.

All relevant Markdown files are in docs/. To update any docs, simply update the Markdown file with your favorite Markdown editor. You can also add new files to the relevant sections.

For other types of contributions outside of text changes to Markdown files, please see Docusaurus' docs for additional info.

Search

On production, search is run by Algolia, specifically their DocSearch service. The service scrapes the website every 24 hours or so, so new contributions to the docs may take about that long to update.

Testing Production Builds

To see if your changes will build (for ex. you made added some screenshots) you can run:

yarn build

Alternatively, you can make a pull request and use the corresponding deploy preview that builds.