Bootstrap: More Details Needed for Build tools Documentation

[LarryAzevedo]

I've recently been tasked with creating my company's version of Bootstrap which includes building off the source code. As a designer, I find the Build tools to be incomplete (because it assumes that you're a developer).

For example, step 2 under Tooling setup should probably mention the fact that you have to open a terminal window and where you have to do what in it. Maybe a video tutorial would help.

Bottom line is... we should try to be more empathetic to others who may not understand this stuff but need to change their own documentation, etc. BTW, I still haven't been able to build the source code but I'll leave that for another day.

[memstat]

I'm trying to follow the instructions, but found some problems.
The documentation says "grunt dist" builds the files in /dist (the css and js), but I found out it also runs the "sass-docs" task. That makes sense, because docs.scss is importing a few bootstrap files.

The problem is npm and bower packages (and probably the others) don't include the necessary doc scss files, making grunt fail with the error "An output directory must be specified when compiling a directory".

Bootstrap is successfully built, but the error is there. It would be nice if the required files were included, like when downloading the source from github (grunt works fine with that package).

Making another task that doesn't compile the docs when you modify bootstrap, despite them depending on the source you just modified, could be useful for people that want to include this grunt task in the general building process of their application (doc tasks are very long)

In addition to that, it would be nice if "grunt watch" didn't build the docs every time _custom.scss is modified, but it makes sense because the docs depend on it. I'm not familiar with grunt, so I don't know if 2 watch commands are possible. Something like "grunt watch-no-docs".

Another thing I can think of is checking if the doc files exist, and don't run any doc related task if they don't.

[bardiharborow]

I'm in the process of overhauling the build system, so these issues and more will be fixed soon. <3

[LarryAzevedo]

Awesome! Thank you so much @bardiharborow. Hopefully it will end up being more intuitive.

[ricksmt]

@bardiharborow Congrats on getting the overhaul done, but could we get the build tools updated? It was terribly disappointing to finally get everything set up just to find out the instructions were outdated.

[Johann-S]

@ricksmt our documentation will be updated in our next release

[patrickhlauke]

@ricksmt to expand, https://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/ is accurate for v4.0.0-alpha.6

The project repo itself here has progressed beyond that. With the next release (first beta) we'll also have updated build docs. In the meantime you can refer to https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/v4-dev/docs/4.0/getting-started/build-tools.md

[mdo]

Closing since this has been updated in the v4-dev branch.