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Holograph

Holograph is a tool for managing the CSS documentation of a project, with specific features that enable one to create and maintain a decent CSS style guide. It is written in PHP and is similar to hologram and Knyle Style Sheets.

Features

• Composable. Just drop in a require to your composer.json file and start running holograph.
• Use as a build tool to generate a style guide as well as minify and combine CSS files.

Installation

Using Composer

Add the following to your composer.json file:

Then run composer install to fetch.

$ composer.phar install

If you don't have composer already installed, this is my recommendation for installing it. See getcomposer.org installation instructions.

Once installed, there is a CLI command in vendor/bin/holograph. The easiest way to use holograph is to ensure that ./vendor/bin is added to your system's $PATH.

$ export PATH=$PATH:./vendor/bin

Global Installation using Composer

An alternate way to install holograph so it is available on any project is by installing it in your ~/.composer directory using the following command:

composer global require 'sumpygump/holograph=dev-master'

You must have ~/.composer/vendor/bin in your environment PATH.

$ export PATH=$PATH:~/.composer/vendor/bin

Usage

The basic feature of holograph is to generate a style guide based on comments added in your CSS files. Additional Markdown files can also be added to create the styleguide's documentation.

CSS Files

The first step in getting use out of Holograph is to format comments blocks in your CSS stylesheets. Add document blocks in your CSS files with some YAML and some markdown as documented below.

html_example Sold For Sale For Rent

Document Blocks

Any comment block starting with /*doc will be considered a document block, and will be inspected and parsed by the styleguide generator.

YAML Matter

A document block must have a YAML block at the top of the comment surrounded by lines with three dashes (---). YAML is a convenient way to store key-value pairs. The YAML block must contain at a minimum the name key.

YAML block key-value pairs consist of a key name on the left followed by a colon, a space, and then the value. For example: name: button

The following document block YAML keys are used by Holograph:

Full example:

The title of the component is used when displaying the heading for that component's documentation.

All components of a given category will be put into an HTML file with the same name as the category. Using the default layout template (see below), each category HTML file will be accessible in the main navigation of the outputed styleguide. Note: If no category is provided, holograph will default the category to index and thus the component documenation will be placed into index.html of the rendered styleguide.

If a component is a parent (has child components), it will be displayed first, followed by its child components on the rendered category page.

Example of parent/child definition:

The above example defines a component named "badge" and a child component named "badgeSkins." The badgeSkins documentation will be placed below the badge documentation.

HTML code examples

If your markdown documentation in your document blocks contains an fenced code block with the type html_example, Holograph will output the sample HTML and the HTML code in the styleguide. This provides a great way to document and showcase example usage of your CSS classes.

Example:

Markdown Files

You can also place Markdown files in the source directory. These files will be processed and included in the destination directory.

Markdown files (.md) will be renamed to .html. For example overview.md will be renamed to overview.html when included in the destination directory. Each markdown file will also be added to the main navigation rendered to the styleguide.

Note: Holograph includes the extra-extended flavor of Markdown syntax, which suppors markdown syntax such as fenced code blocks and tables.

Configuration

Holograph uses a configuration file to define paths and other aspecst for the current directory's build parameters.

The default name for the configuration file is holograph.yml. Holograph looks for a file of this name in the current directory when building.

The following is the default config file.

File paths

Here is an explanation of the file paths in the config file.

Documentation Assets

The documentation assets provides template files and CSS files used to render the structure of the styleguide. By default, Holograph looks for a file called layout.html in the documenation_assets directory. If none is found it will use the default layout file in the default-templates directory in the Holograph install directory.

The layout.html file can contain the following tokens that will be replaced during the build step:

• {{title}} - This will be replaced with the title defined in the config file
• {{main_stylesheet}} - This will be replaced with the path to the stylesheet generated by the preprocessor and represents the styles you are wishing to document with the styleguide.
• {{navigation}} - This will be replaced with a <ul> of the generated HTML files (categories)
• {{content}} - This will be replaced with the content of the styleguide documentation.

You are encouraged to create a style guide layout file that will fit with your site's branding or design. Any subfolders in the documentation_assets will also be copied into the destination folder so you can include assets like fonts, images, css and javascript to be used by the styleguide layout.

Running holograph

Holograph can be run from the command line

$ holograph
Holograph 0.7
A markdown based build and documentation system for OOCSS

Usage: holograph <action> [OPTIONS]

Actions:
  init : Initialize environment for holograph (write conf file with defaults)
  config : Show current configuration parameters
  build : Build the style guide HTML/CSS
  help : Display program help and exit

Options:
  -c <file> | --conf <file> : Use alternate configuration file
  -h | --help : Display program help and exit
  -q | --quiet : Quiet mode (Don't output anything)
  -v | --verbose : Verbose output mode
  --version : Display program version and exit
  --compat : Use hologram compatible mode (header.html/footer.html)

init

An easy way to create a clean holograph.yml config file in the current directory is to run the holograph init command.

config

Running holograph config will display the current configuration parameters in the config file of the current directory.

build

To build the styleguide from the source .css and .md files, run holograph build. This will complete the following tasks:

1. read the config file
2. run the preprocessor (optimization step)
3. parse the CSS and Markdown files
4. generate the styleguide HTML files
5. copy the documentation assets and any other defined dependencies into the destination directory.

The Preprocessor

The preprocessor is a mechanism to run a optimization step prior to building the styleguide documentation. The current version only supports the options minify or none. The "minify" option will use Minify to minify the CSS files within the source directory and then combine them into one file. This is currently a limited operation. It is expected that this functionality will be expanded to support more complex configurations and other optimization engines such as Sass or Less.

The following settings in the config file are used by the preprocessor:

preprocessor: minify

The "preprocessor" key provides a directive of which minify option to use. Currently the options are "minify" or "none".

build: ./build/css

The "build" key defines a directory where the final optimized CSS file should be written.

main_stylesheet: build/css/screen.css

The "main_stylesheet" is the file path and name the preprocessor uses as the final output file for the optimized stylesheet. This value is also used to include the destination stylesheet in the styleguide build output.