Internet Computer developer portal

The IC developer portal brings together all the resources needed for developers to build on the Internet Computer.

https://internetcomputer.org

Contributing

The IC developer portal uses Docusaurus.

Format and style guidelines

The developer documentation must follow the provided style guide in order to be submitted:

Developer docs style guide.

Local development

Requirements

• Node v16 (v18 not recommended).

Install and run locally

While modifying documentation in the repository, you can preview the changes locally by executing the following commands.

cd portal/
git submodule update --init
npm install
npm start

The developer portal frontend should appear in your browser under http://localhost:3000.

To preview a specific locale in the context of an internationalization contribution, start the docs with the following command:

npm start -- --locale <locale>

Adding a document

Docusaurus is quite easy to use and facilitates the creation of documents. The developer portal uses Markdown as its default format with enhancements provided by Docusuaurus.

To create a document, head to the /docs folder and create a Markdown file in the directory of your choice. Please assure that the document's contents follow the developer docs style guide:

Developer docs style guide.

Here is an example of a docs sub-directory:

developer-docs/
    developer-docs/
        home.mdx
        quickstart/
            ...
    references/
        ...

Changing the roadmap

The roadmap items are stored as markdown files inside the roadmap directory.

The items are grouped by domain and status.

roadmap
├── 1_core-protocol
│   ├── deployed
│   │   ├── network_performance.md
│   │   └── nodes_can_be_reassigned.md
│   ├── in-progress
│   │   ├── 1_btc-integration.md
│   │   ├── 2_tecdsa.md
│   │   ├── 3_https-outcalls.md
│   │   ├── 4_high-replication-subnets.md
│   │   └── 5_deterministic-time-slicing.md
│   ├── index.md
│   └── pending
│       └── eth-integration.md
├── 2_boundary_nodes
│   ├── deployed
│   │   └── icos-nodes.md
│   ├── in-progress
│   │   ├── 1_seo_and_streaming.md
│   │   ├── 2_asset_canister_caching.md
...

• To change the title, links, or ETA of an item, edit the metadata section at the top of each markdown document.
• To change the status of an item, eg. from in-progress to deployed, move the file to the deployed directory.
• Items are listed in alphabetical order of their filename, to enforce a certain ordering between items you can prefix the filenames with numbers.
• To mark an item as a community request, set is_community: true in the item's metadata.

Each domain folder contains an index.md file which adds metadata, like a title, a description, and cover images.

Changing the 'how it works' content

The how it works page cards and subpages are stored as markdown files inside the how-it-works directory.

how-it-works
├── 1_about
│   ├── 01-overview-of-the-internet-computer.card.md
│   ├── 01-overview-of-the-internet-computer.subpage.md
│   ├── canister-lifecycle.card.md
│   ├── canister-lifecycle.subpage.md
│   └── index.md
├── 2_featured
│   ├── direct-integration-with-bitcoin.card.md
│   ├── direct-integration-with-bitcoin.subpage.md
│   ├── index.md
│   ├── sns.card.md
│   ├── threshold-ecdsa-signing.card.md
│   ├── threshold-ecdsa-signing.subpage.md

The directory contains markdown files ending in .card.md and .subpage.md.

The .card.md files will show up as part of the /how-it-works page, under the section they are grouped in (eg. Featured).

The .subpage.md files will each generate a subpage under /how-it-works/, based on the files' metadata and content:

• The slug parameter will determine the final URL, eg. the slug canister-lifecycle will generate the page /how-it-works/canister-lifecycle.
• The title, abstract (optional), and coverImage will determine how the page looks when shared on social media

How to embed YouTube videos:

You can embed YouTube videos by adding the video's cover image, then turning the image into a link to the video itself, eg:

[![Watch youtube video](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YWHTNr8RZHg/maxresdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWHTNr8RZHg)

The page will automatically put the YouTube icon on the cover image, imitating an embedded video.

You can get the cover image of a video by substituting the video ID into the following URL:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/INSERT_VIDEO_ID_HERE/0.jpg

If the resulting image is low quality, you can try https://i.ytimg.com/vi/INSERT_VIDEO_ID_HERE/maxresdefault.jpg, but it does not always exist.

⚠️ Contributions' musts:

• Making sure that the .github/CODEOWNERS file is filled with new documents that you added. This way we can ensure that future Pull Requests are reviewed by the right people.
• When creating a document, it must be registered in /sidebars.js, otherwise, it will not appear in the side navigation bar.
• All documents must follow the provided Developer docs style guide.

More information about document creation on Docusaurus's docs.

Deployed Previews

Whenever a Pull Request is created on the repository, a CI job will appear and deploy a Preview on Netlify so that reviewers can easily check the changes made the way the end users will.

To access the preview, head to the very bottom of your pull request where you will see the list of deployments. Once the job is finished, you should see as active the "Preview Netlify" deployment.

Then simply press the "View deployment" button to in your fresh Netlify preview.

Contribution workflow

Here is a description of how a contribution should be made to the developer portal:

1. The contributor creates a fork/branch where the changes are made.
2. A pull request (PR) is created from this branch to master. the preview is generated and the reviewers can directly check the preview website.
3. After the pull request is merged into master, CI/CD will deploy the contents to the IC. The changes made will appear on the webpage under the version in the dropdown named "Current".
4. Optional: When a repo maintainer tags a commit on master as $TAG, then CI/CD deploys the contents to the IC. The webpage will default to the new "$TAG" version, visible in the versions dropdown, and allow users to view the contents pinned at that tag.

Best practices

The portal repo uses git submodules to distribute content authoring across several repositories. This can prove challenging if you want to make updates to docs that refer to stale content in other repos. Here are some best practices that may prove helpful when contributing to portal.

1. Don't commit changes to submodules. a. Check your staged changes and see if any files are nested within the submodules directory. If so - revert them. Those changes must go into the corresponding submodule repository.
2. Be wary of the order of operations when it comes to submodules. a. If you do intend to make changes to content under submodules, the changes need to be merged into the respective repo first. b. Once the change has been merged, you will also need to update portal's ref to that repo. You can do that by running git submodule update --remote --merge
3. Build locally. a. You can save yourself some headache if you run npm run build locally before you push your changes. If the build fails locally, it will almost certainly fail in CI. b. Our CI requires that a set of checks pass before a PR can be merged. One of those checks whether the code can be deployed to a canister. You do not need to deploy a canister locally, but at the very least npm run build should pass.

Community-created agents and CDKs

The agents and CDKs sections should not only contain docs for DFINITY-created agents and CDKs. We therefore invite other projects to:

• Link to their own agents or CDKs on the respective index pages (the files to be edited are in docs/developer-docs/build/agents/index.md or docs/developer-docs/backend/choosing-language.md).
• Add their own documentation as a folder under Agents or CDKs.

Community-created developer tools

We invite developers to add their IC-focused developer tools to the developer tools page by appending an entry to the communityToolingItems array in src/components/Common/toolingItems.ts.

Please make sure to add appropriate tags to make the tool easy to discover for other devs. Avoid introducing new tags if possible.

Community-created sample projects

You can submit your sample project to be displayed on the samples page.

Add your submission to the community projects file and open a pull request. You can use an editor with TypeScript support to make sure your submission follows the schema.

Showcase submission guidelines

Disclaimer: You should have a working canister for your product to be showcased. Our team will review the PR and get back to you for any further questions. In the meantime, please contact devcomms@dfinity.org if you have any questions.

Add your project to the end of showcase.json. Refer to the object schema below for the required fields.

Make up a unique project id. For example, if your project is called Awesome ICP Project!, your project id could be awesome-icp-project.

Your logo/video/screenshots files should be prefixed with your project id, and placed in the /static/img/showcase folder. For example, if your project id is awesome-icp-project, your logo file should be named awesome-icp-project_logo.webp and placed in the /static/img/showcase folder.

The Ecosystem Helper is an on-chain tool that helps you submit your project to internetcomputer.org. It helps with image conversion, resizing, previewing the project cards used throughout the website, and it produces a valid JSON document you can use. Fill out the form and download the asset bundle in a zip file.

Asset guidelines

Asset		Requirements	Format	Notes
logo	required	112x112px	webp/svg/png	Currently displayed 56x56px
screenshots	optional	1024x576px	webp/jpg	The schema supports multiple files, but only the first one will be displayed
video	optional	max 10MB	webm/mp4	If there is a video file specified, it will be displayed instead of a screenshot.

Tags

The list of tags is not final, and will be updated as the project evolves. For now, the following tags are available:

• Wallet
• Bitcoin
• NFT
• SocialFi
• DeFi
• Games
• DAO
• Metaverse
• Tools / Infrastructure

Object schema

  {
    id: string,
    name: string,
    oneLiner: string, // short description of the project
    website: string, // URL starting with `https://`

    tags: ('Wallet' | 'Bitcoin' | 'NFT' | 'SocialFi' | 'DeFi' | 'Games' | 'DAO' | 'Metaverse' | 'Tools / Infrastructure')[],
    description: string, // description of the project
    stats: string, // eg. "10,000 users"
    logo: string, // url to logo file, eg. /img/showcase/awesome-icp-project_logo.webp
    
    usesInternetIdentity: boolean,
    authOrigins?: string[]; // optional additional (URL) origins that can be utilized for signing in to your dapp

    github?: string, // full URL to github repo, if available
    youtube?: string, // full URL to a YouTube video or channel, if available
    twitter?: string, // full URL to a twitter account, if available

    screenshots?: string[], // optional array of urls to screenshot files

    video?: string, // optional url to video file, eg. /img/showcase/awesome-icp-project_video.webm
    videoContentType?: 'video/webm' | 'video/mp4', // to feed into the type attribute of the video/source element

    submittableId?: string, // optional id of the submittable form
  },