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Contribution guide

The "interactive-examples" repository provides interactive examples for MDN Web Docs.

If you're interested in contributing to this project, great! This file should help you get started.

Types of contribution

There are many ways you can help improve this repository! For example:

  • Write a brand-new example: for example, you might notice that there are no examples for a particular CSS property.
  • Improve an existing example: for example, you might notice a problem with an existing example, or some way it could be made more helpful.
  • Fix a bug: we have a list of issues, or maybe you found your own.

This guide focuses on contributing examples, although we welcome contributions to the editor and infrastructure code as well.

Good first issues

Setup

To contribute live examples all you need is a text editor, git, a GitHub account, and Nodejs.

As far as text/code editors go, there are more editors than you can shake a stick at, so it's down to personal preference. Atom is a great, open source editor we can definitely recommend.

For more information on setting up Git on your machine, read this article.

With the above dependencies satisfied, create your new account on Github.

Lastly, install Nodejs for your operating system.

Fork and clone

Next up, you need to fork and clone the repo to be able to contribute to it. You can learn about forking on Github. Once you have your own fork, clone it to your local machine.

Finally, change into the new directory created by the clone and run the following command:

npm install

This will ensure that you have all the required development modules installed to build and test your contributions. You are now ready to contribute.

We've written separate guides to contributing each type of example:

Testing

Once you've written an example you can run a local server to try it out.

From your command line run:

npm run build

Once this completes run:

npm start

This should give you some output including lines like:

Starting up http-server, serving ./docs
Available on:
  http://127.0.0.1:9090
  http://192.168.1.68:9090

Point your browser to either of those URLs, then click on the pages link. In the page that appears:

  • CSS examples are under css
  • JavaScript examples are under js
  • HTML examples are under tabbed

Find your example and try it out. Once you're satisfied, submit your pull request.

Publishing

After your pull request is reviewed and merged, you can publish your example on MDN Web Docs. On the page that corresponds to the example, add the following to the page source (typically after the introductory paragraph):

<div>{{EmbedInteractiveExample("pages/TYPE/FILENAME")}}</div>

<p class="hidden">The source for this interactive example is stored in a GitHub repository. If you'd like to contribute to the interactive examples project, please clone <a href="https://github.com/mdn/interactive-examples">https://github.com/mdn/interactive-examples</a> and send us a pull request.</p>

where TYPE is the kind of example (such as js, css, or tabbed) and FILENAME is the name of the file that contains the example (like margin.html or date-constructor.html).

Short or tall examples

For HTML and JS examples, there are three different possible heights for the editor: short, standard, and tall. If your example is short or tall you need to pass an extra parameter to EmbedInteractiveExample, like this:

{{EmbedInteractiveExample("pages/js/reflect-deleteproperty.html", "taller")}}

or

{{EmbedInteractiveExample("pages/js/string-length.html", "shorter")}}

How do you know if your example is short or tall?

  • for HTML examples, this is a thing you set explicitly, by supplying a CSS class in the example source. See Changing the editor height.
  • for JS examples, short or tall editors are selected automatically for you:
    • Examples less than 7 lines long get the short editor, so you should provide the "shorter" argument to EmbedInteractiveExample
    • Examples 7-12 lines inclusive get the standard editor, so you should not provide any extra argument to EmbedInteractiveExample
    • Examples 13 or more lines long get the tall editor, so you should provide the "taller" argument to EmbedInteractiveExample

Thank you!

Thank you for your contribution ~ o/\o