The Dart language site (dart.dev)

The documentation site for the Dart programming language, built with Eleventy and hosted on Firebase.

We welcome contributions of all kinds! To set up the site locally, follow the below guidelines on Building the site. To learn more about contributing to this repository, check out the Contributing guidelines.

Getting started

Start by looking for an issue that catches your interest, or create an issue with your proposed change. Consider adding a comment to let everyone know that you're working on it, and feel free to ask any questions you have on the same issue.

To update this site, fork the repo, make your changes, and generate a pull request. For small, contained changes (such as style and typo fixes), you probably don't need to build this site. Often you can make changes using the GitHub UI. We can stage the changes automatically in your pull request.

Important

If you are cloning this repository locally, follow the below instruction on cloning with its submodule.

If your change involves code samples, adds/removes pages, or affects navigation, do consider building and test your work before submitting.

If you want or need to build the site, follow the steps below.

Build the site

For changes beyond simple text and CSS tweaks, we recommend running the site locally to enable an edit-refresh cycle.

Get the prerequisites

Install the following tools to build and develop the site:

Dart

The latest stable release of Dart is required to build the site and run its tooling. This can be the Dart included in the Flutter SDK. If you don't have Dart or need to update, follow the instructions at Get the Dart SDK.

If you already have Dart installed, verify it's on your path and already the latest stable version:

dart --version

Node.js

The latest stable LTS release of Node.js is required to build the site. If you don't have Node.js or need to update, download your computer's corresponding version and follow the instructions from the Node.js download archive. If you prefer, you can use a version manager such as nvm, and run nvm install from the repository's root directory.

If you already have Node installed, verify it's available on your path and already the latest stable version (currently 20.10 or later):

node --version

If your version is out of date, follow the update instructions for how you originally installed it.

Clone this repo and its submodules

Note

This repository has git submodules, which affects how you clone it. The GitHub documentation has general help on forking and cloning repos.

If you're not a member of the Dart organization, we recommend you create a fork of this repo under your own account, and then submit a PR from that fork.

Once you have a fork (or you're a Dart org member), choose one of the following submodule-cloning techniques:

1. Clone the repo and its submodule at the same time using the --recurse-submodules option:

   git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/dart-lang/site-www.git
   

2. If you've already cloned the repo without its submodule, then run this command from the root of the repository:

   git submodule update --init --recursive
   

Note

At any time during development you can use the git submodule command to refresh submodules:

git pull && git submodule update --init --recursive

Set up your local environment and serve changes

Before you continue setting up the site infrastructure, verify the correct versions of Dart and Node.js are set up and available by following the instructions in Get the prerequisites.

1. Optional: After cloning the repo and its submodules, create a branch for your changes:

   git checkout -b <BRANCH_NAME>
   

2. From the root directory of the repository, fetch the site's Dart dependencies.

   dart pub get
   

3. Install pnpm using your preferred installation method. pnpm is an alternative, efficient package manager for npm packages. If you already have pnpm, verify you have the latest stable version. We recommend using corepack to install and manage pnpm versions, since it is bundled with most installations of Node.

   If you haven't used corepack before, you'll need to first enable it with corepack enable. Then, to install the correct pnpm version, from the root directory of the repository, run corepack install:

   corepack enable
   corepack install
   

4. Once you have pnpm installed and setup, fetch the site's npm dependencies using pnpm install. We highly recommend you use pnpm, but you can also use npm.

   pnpm install
   

5. From the root directory, run the dash_site tool to validate your setup and learn about the available commands.

   ./dash_site --help
   

6. From the root directory, serve the site locally.

   ./dash_site serve
   

   This command generates and serves the site on a local port that's printed to your terminal.

7. View your changes in the browser by navigating to http://localhost:4000.

   Note the port might be different if 4000 is taken.

   If you want to check the raw, generated HTML output and structure, view the _site directory in a file explorer or an IDE.

8. Make your changes to the local repo.

   The site should automatically rebuild on most changes, but if something doesn't update, exit the process and rerun the command. Improvements to this functionality are planned. Please open a new issue to track the issue if this occurs.

9. Commit your changes to the branch and submit your PR.

   If your change is large, or you'd like to test it, consider validating your changes.

Tip

To find additional commands that you can run, run ./dash_site --help from the repository's root directory.

Validate your changes

Check documentation and example code

If you've made changes to the code in the /examples or /tool directories, commit your work, then run the following command to verify it is up to date and matches the site standards.

./dash_site check-all

If this script reports any errors or warnings, then address those issues and rerun the command. If you have any issues, leave a comment on your issue or pull request, and we'll try our best to help you. You can also chat with us on the #hackers-devrel channel on the Flutter contributors Discord!

Refresh code excerpts

A build that fails with the error Error: Some code excerpts needed to be updated! means that one or more code excerpts in the site Markdown files aren't identical to the code regions declared in the corresponding .dart files.

To resolve this error, from the root of the site-www directory, run ./dash_site refresh-excerpts.

To learn more about creating, editing, and using code excerpts, check out the excerpt updater package documentation.

[Optional] Deploy to a staging site

Submitted pull requests can be automatically staged by a site maintainer. If you'd like to stage the site yourself though, you can build a full version and upload it to Firebase.

1. If you don't already have a Firebase project,

   • Navigate to the Firebase Console and create your own Firebase project (for example, dart-dev-staging).

   • Head back to your local terminal and verify that you are logged in.

     firebase login
     

   • Ensure that your project exists and activate that project:

     firebase projects:list
     firebase use <your-project>
     

2. From the root directory of the repository, build the site:

   ./dash_site build
   

   This will build the site and copy it to your local _site directory. If that directory previously existed, it will be replaced.

3. Deploy to your activated Firebase project's default hosting site:

   firebase deploy --only hosting
   

4. Navigate to your PR on GitHub and include the link of the staged version. Do consider adding a reference to the commit you staged, so that reviewers know if any further changes have been made.