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MDN Content is all the source documents for MDN Web Docs.

To make edits you use Yari to preview your edits locally.

To run the previewing service, you need git, Node (version >=12) and Yarn 1.

Run these commands in your bash:

git clone https://github.com/mdn/content.git mdn/content
cd mdn/content
yarn
yarn start
open http://localhost:5000

When you start a new piece of work, always remember to first run:

git pull origin main
yarn
yarn start

This will upgrade everything to the latest and greatest. From this, you create your git topic branches, which is what you'll push to your fork and make pull requests from.

When you preview pages you can press a button to open the source file in your preferred editor. For this to work, you need to have set an environment variable called EDITOR. Suppose you prefer VS Code as your editor to edit content. Type this:

export EDITOR=code
yarn start

Note, this is how you do it on terminals with bash (macOS and Linux) and you have to do it differently on Windows.

Now, when you're previewing a page and press the "Edit in your editor" button, it will open the same as running:

code files/en-us/web/the/page/you/used/index.html

Instead of having to type export EDITOR=code every time before you type yarn start you can store this in your personal .env file. It might not exist so you might need to create one. For example:

echo 'EDITOR=code' >> .env
yarn start

Now, it should be set like that even after you've close and started a new terminal window.