Primer CSS Development

If you’ve made it this far, thank you! We appreciate your contribution, and hope that this document helps you along the way. If you have any questions or problems, don’t hesitate to file an issue.

Structure

Primer CSS is published to npm as @primer/css. Each of Primer CSS’s “modules” lives in a subfolder under src/ with an index.scss in it. Generally speaking, the styles are divided into three primary themes:

• Core styles (in core/) are common dependencies, which include support variables, native element and typography styles, buttons, navigation, tooltips, etc.
• Product styles (in product/) are specific to github.com, and include components such as avatars, labels, markdown styles, popovers, and progress indicators.
• Marketing styles (in marketing/) are specific to GitHub marketing efforts, including international and event-focused sites as well as the more design-heavy feature pages on github.com. Marketing styles include new colors and button styles, and extend the core typography and whitespace scales.

Paths

Here’s what you need to know about how the files are structured in both git and in the published npm module:

• In git, all of the SCSS source files live in the src/ directory.

• When published, all of the files in src/ are “hoisted” to the package root so that you can import, say, utilities with:

  @import '@primer/css/utilities/index.scss';
  

• All bundle interdependencies within Primer CSS are defined as relative imports (e.g. with ../), so everything should work fine as long as the @primer/css directory is in one of your Sass include paths (i.e. node_modules).

Install

Run npm install to install the npm dependencies.

The docs directory

The docs directory contains all of the documentation files in our docs site. Files are nested in the /content folder.

Code blocks

All html fenced code blocks in src/**/*.md will be rendered as stories and listed under the relevant module’s name in the left-hand nav. File changes should trigger a live reload automatically (after a brief delay).

Storybook

Primer CSS Storybook is used for designing and prototyping components. Stories are written in HTML and leverage the Storybook API for configuring conditional logic.

npm run storybook

The Storybook directory

Storybook configuration files live in .storybook. Addons and additional global config can be added to main.js or preview.js

Stories

Stories are individual .jsx or .mdx files that contain component HTML for prototyping, typically showcasing all possible variations of a component. Stories can be found in the stories directory and are organized by component. Storybook will build and deploy a preview on any open Pull Request.

Scripts

Our package.json houses a collection of run-scripts that we use to maintain, test, build, and publish Primer CSS. Run npm run <script> with any of the following values for <script>:

• dist runs script/dist, which creates CSS bundles of all the index.scss files in src/.
• stylelint lints the CSS source files.
• eslint lints the JavaScript source files.
• test runs our test suite.
• storybook runs storybook local development server.

The above list may not always be up-to-date. You can list all of the available scripts by calling npm run with no other arguments.