Build tools
Learn how to use CoreUI for Bootstrap included npm scripts to build our documentation, compile source code, run tests, and more.
🤖 Looking for the LLM-optimized version?View llm.md
Tooling setup
CoreUI for Bootstrap usesnpm scripts for its build system. Ourpackage.json includes convenient methods for working with the framework, including compiling code, running tests, and more.
To use our build system and run our documentation locally, you’ll need a copy of CoreUI’s source files and Node. Follow these steps and you should be ready to rock:
- Download and install Node.js, which we use to manage our dependencies.
- Eitherdownload CoreUI’s sources or forkCoreUI’s repository.
- Navigate to the root
/coreuidirectory and runnpm installto install our local dependencies listed inpackage.json.
When completed, you’ll be able to run the various commands provided from the command line.
Using npm scripts
Ourpackage.json includes numerous tasks for developing the project. Runnpm run to see all the npm scripts in your terminal.Primary tasks include:
| Task | Description |
|---|---|
npm start | Compiles CSS and JavaScript, builds the documentation, and starts a local server. |
npm run dist | Creates thedist/ directory with compiled files. UsesSass,Autoprefixer, andterser. |
npm test | Runs tests locally after runningnpm run dist |
npm run docs-serve | Builds and runs the documentation locally. |
Sass
Bootstrap usesDart Sass for compiling our Sass source files into CSS files (included in our build process), and we recommend you do the same if you’re compiling Sass using your own asset pipeline. We previously used Node Sass for Bootstrap v4, but LibSass and packages built on top of it, including Node Sass, are nowdeprecated.
Dart Sass uses a rounding precision of 10 and for efficiency reasons does not allow adjustment of this value. We don’t lower this precision during further processing of our generated CSS, such as during minification, but if you chose to do so we recommend maintaining a precision of at least 6 to prevent issues with browser rounding.
Autoprefixer
CoreUI for Bootstrap usesAutoprefixer (included in our build process) to automatically add vendor prefixes to some CSS properties at build time. Doing so saves us time and code by allowing us to write key parts of our CSS a single time while eliminating the need for vendor mixins like those found in v3.
We maintain the list of browsers supported through Autoprefixer in a separate file within our GitHub repository. See.browserslistrc for details.
RTLCSS
CoreUI for Bootstrap usesRTLCSS to process compiled CSS and convert them to RTL – basically replacing horizontal direction aware properties (eg.padding-left) with their opposite. It allows us only write our CSS a single time and make minor tweaks using RTLCSScontrol andvalue directives.
Local documentation
Running our documentation locally requires the use of Hugo, which gets installed via thehugo-bin npm package. Hugo is a blazingly fast and quite extensible static site generator that provides us: basic includes, Markdown-based files, templates, and more. Here’s how to get it started:
- Run through thetooling setup above to install all dependencies.
- From the root
/coreuidirectory, runnpm run docs-servein the command line. - Open
http://localhost:9001/in your browser, and voilà.
Learn more about using Hugo by reading itsdocumentation.
Troubleshooting
Should you encounter problems with installing dependencies, uninstall all previous dependency versions (global and local). Then, rerunnpm install.