Generating a preview

Learn how to generate a local site preview, so you can see how your work would look on Braze Docs.

Prerequisites

If you haven’t already, complete the steps for Contributing to Braze Docs.

Generating the preview

Step 1: Checkout a branch

In your terminal, check out a branch to use for your site preview.

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git checkout BRANCH_NAME

Replace BRANCH_NAME with the name of one of your branches or another person’s branch. Your command should be similar to the following:

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git checkout BD-2346-fixing-typo-swift

Step 2: Start a local server

When you start a local server, the files in your current branch are used to you build a local preview of Braze Docs. To start a local server using your current branch, run the following command in your braze-docs directory.

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rake

The output will be similar to the following:

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== Sinatra (v3.0.4) has taken the stage on 4000 for development with backup from Puma
Puma starting in single mode...
* Puma version: 6.3.1 (ruby 3.2.2-p225) ("Mugi No Toki Itaru")
*  Min threads: 8
*  Max threads: 32
*  Environment: development
*          PID: 16158
* Listening on http://127.0.0.1:4000
...

Step 3: Open your site preview

By default, your site preview will be generated on localhost http://127.0.0.1:4000. To open your site preview, open the link in your web browser.

Step 4: Stop your local server

To stop your local server, reopen the terminal and press Control + C.

Updating the preview

In most cases, your site preview will update automatically when you make changes to the files in braze-docs. When this happens, your terminal will output a message similar to the following:

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Asset Pipeline: Processing 'javascript_asset_tag' manifest 'global'
Asset Pipeline: Saved 'global-128fd02b54e35ea79fcb21ea460fac06.js' to '/Users/alex-lee/braze-docs/_site/assets'
                    ...done in 1.940883 seconds.

To see these updates in your browser, refresh the page.

However, there are cases when your site preview will not be automatically updated, such as when:

• A file or directory name is changed
• A new file or directory is added
• The content of a file in the _includes directory is edited

To see these updates, you’ll need to stop your local server and start it again.