• About The Project
  • Build Requirements
• Getting Started Building a Local Deployment of the Tanzu Developer Center
  • Software Installation Prerequisites
  • Run a Local Copy of the Tanzu Developer Center
• Troubleshooting
  • Q. I'm receiving an error about cloning themes/docsy
  • Q. make preview is throwing a fatal error: pipe failed error
  • Q. I am on Windows and make preview doesn't work
• Open Projects, Issues, and Content Backlog
• Contributing
  • Contributing Code
  • Contributing Content
• Code of Conduct
• Tanzu Developer Center Open Source License

About The Project

The VMware Tanzu Developer Center is a site specifically built to be a great resource for software development teams. The contributions on the Tanzu Developer Center are from teams across VMware, as well as individuals without.

Our guiding principle is to ensure readers have free, immediate access to all the content on the Tanzu Developer Center. No purchase is ever necessary to access content on the Tanzu Developer Center because it is either open source or an easily accessible trial.

Getting Started Building a Local Deployment of the Tanzu Developer Center

Before you can build a local copy of the Tanzu Developer Center, there are software prerequisites that you’re going to need to install.

Note: The instructions below are primarily designed for Mac users. While you should be able to make things work on Windows as well, it may require a few additional steps. (For example, using make should work natively on a Mac with Xcode dev tools installed, but requires a special installation for Windows.

Requirements for Local Development / Build

• Hugo
• Netlify
• npm
• act
• Docker
• make

Software Installation Prerequisites

• Install Hugo — The VMware Tanzu Developer Center uses Hugo to build the site from Markdown files. You'll need to get Hugo if you want to build and run the site locally. Make sure you install the extended version with support for SCSS/SASS. This site pins hugo to a specific version (currently 0.107.0) to build so if you're using a different version, your experience may vary. To install hugo, follow the instructions for your specific environment as detailed in the hugo documentation. Ultimately, you have two main options:

  • Download the correct extended binary for your OS from gohugo GitHub releases page for 0.107.0 and then move the hugo binary to an appropriate location (ie. sudo cp hugo /usr/local/bin) and/or add it to your PATH.
  • Use brew install hugo and brew pin hugo to pin it to the correct version (0.107.0). (MacOS only.)

• Install Node (and NPM) — Certain features of the site require Node in order to build (PostCSS, Autoprefixer, etc.), and the Node Package Manager (npm) is also used to manage local packages. If you don’t already have Node installed, you’ll need it in order to build the site. Though it may work with different versions, you should use the same ones that Netlify does, which are Node 16 (as defined in the .nvmrc file at the root) and npm 8 (the corresponding version that comes with Node 16). You may download and install Node or use brew to install it:

  brew install node@16

Note: The reason the .nvmrc is required even though the default should already be v16 for default image that Netlify is set to use - Ubuntu Focal 20.04 - when the site repository was originally linked Netlify, it was using an older image that defaulted to v12, so it must be specified explicitly in the .nvmrc file. (See this article for more details.

• Install act — The Tanzu Developer Center uses GitHub Actions to perform automated testing periodically, and on pull requests. If you plan to run these tests locally, you will need act. Follow these instructions to install act, or use brew:

  brew install act

• Install Docker — The act tool depends upon Docker to build images for local automated tests. You can download Docker Desktop or use brew:

  brew install docker --cask

  Note: Mac OS X requires Docker Desktop 2.4 or later

Run a Local Copy of the Tanzu Developer Center

To get a local copy of the Tanzu Developer Center up and running, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository.

   git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/tanzu-dev-portal.git

2. Build a preview of the website. The website will be available at http://localhost:1313/developer.

   make preview

Troubleshooting

Q. I'm receiving an error about cloning themes/docsy

With the change with how the theme files are overridden, the first time you update your branch you may see the following issue when running make preview:

git submodule update --init --recursive
Submodule 'themes/docsy' (https://github.com/google/docsy.git) registered for path 'themes/docsy'
fatal: not a git repository: /private/tmp/tanzu-dev-portal/themes/docsy/../../.git/modules/themes/docsy
Failed to clone 'themes/docsy'. Retry scheduled
BUG: submodule considered for cloning, doesn't need cloning any more?
fatal: could not get a repository handle for submodule 'themes/docsy'
make: *** [theme] Error 1

You can run the following command for a one-time fix:

make clean-submodule

Q. make preview is throwing a fatal error: pipe failed error

This is due to the number of files that are opened during the process of building the site. If you're on OSX, this can be addressed with the following command:

sudo launchctl limit maxfiles 65535 200000
ulimit -n 65535
sudo sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=100000
sudo sysctl -w kern.maxfilesperproc=65535

Q. I am on Windows and make preview doesn't work

On Windows, you may need to use hugo server -D to start the application. The site will then be available on http://localhost:1313/

Open Projects, Issues, and Content Backlog

See the open issues and project boards for a list of proposed features, content backlog, and known issues.

Contributing

Content contributions are what make open source and the developer community such an amazing place to learn, inspire, and create. Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated.

Contributing Code

The code contribution process is documented in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Contributing Content

The content contribution process is documented fully on our GitHub wiki site and includes methods for both VMware employees as well as non-employees to contribute to content or bug fixes.

Code of Conduct

We, the Admin team of the Tanzu Developer Center adhere to a code of conduct available here: CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.

Tanzu Developer Center Open Source License

The Tanzu Developer Center is distributed under the Apache License. For more information, see LICENSE.