How can I build the source version and deploy to my own server?

[FarhadG]

Lovin' this framework and wanting to modify the source code for more versatile theme control. I've gotten the this repo working locally and am able to modify the docs folder, so I know it's working. What I'm not able to figure out is how to build the local version and be able to deploy the static files on a server. I've tried both npm run build and npm run docs:build that output to dist but they don't seem to the output I'd need to serve on a server. Thank you, in advance, for your guidance.

[Fil]

• the build command transpiles the code to javascript and saves it to the dist/ folder
• the docs:build command creates the documentation website and saves it to the docs/.observablehq/dist/ folder

If you are building the docs from this repo, you shouldn't need to build the code first, docs:build should reflect the changes you made both in the src/ and the docs/ directories.

[FarhadG]

Thank you, @Fil, for the quick response. Worked! I can make a PR to the repo adding these instructions regarding the scripts, if helpful (or needed).

[Fil]

It's documented here https://observablehq.com/framework/contributing

[drnw]

The documentation is clear :-) I followed it today when forking the repo. I have no experience with TypeScript!

For anyone curious about getting hosting working, I added a simple GitHub Pages deploy action. To keep my experiments separate, my site lives in a new folder playpen. You can see the built site here

To achieve this I added to the scripts in package.json:

"playpen:build": "tsx --no-warnings=ExperimentalWarning ./src/bin/observable.ts build"

and a workflow .github/workflows/gh-pages.yml to publish to Github Pages.

My fork is public at https://github.com/drnw/observable/