Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/btholt/next-course-starter

Starter kit for making courses for Frontend Masters
https://github.com/btholt/next-course-starter

Last synced: about 2 months ago
JSON representation

Starter kit for making courses for Frontend Masters

Awesome Lists containing this project

README 

        
Course Website Starter Template
 





  A starter template build in Next.js for creating educational materials using Markdown.




## Get Started



1. Set up Node.js v20+

1. Clone this repo

1. Run `npm install`

1. Run `npm run dev` to start the dev server

1. Open http://localhost:3000/ in a browser



_Instructions for deploying the course website to GitHub Pages are below_



## Configure Your Course



There are several things to configure before getting started.



### course.json



This json file allows you to configure the details of the site. Update the info here and it'll update it everywhere throughout the course website.



- _author.name_ – Your name

- _author.company_ – The company you work at or whatever you want as your subtitle. Optional.

- _title_ – The title of your course

- _subtitle_ – The subtitle of your course. Optional.

- _frontendMastersLink_ – A link to the published video on FrontendMasters.com. Optional.

- _social.linkedin_ - Your LinkedIn public user name, just the name, not the full link. Optional

- _social.twitter_ – Your Twitter user name. Optional.

- _social.github_ – Your GitHub user name. Optional.

- _description_ – The description you want to show up in search engine results.

- _keywords_ – The SEO keywords for this course. An array of strings

- _productionBaseUrl_ – Typically useful for GitHub Pages. This adds a base path to your project. For GitHub Pages, this will be the name of your repo. For example, this site's base URL is `/next-course-starter` because the production URL for this site is `btholt.github.io/next-course-starer`. Do note this will also make your dev server's base URL this as well so you can catch problems before they go to production. **IF THIS IS SET, YOUR / PATH WILL 404**

- _csvPath_ – A CSV with the meta data for your lessons will be created at this path when you build or export the project. If you delete this config option it will not generate a CSV.



### styles/variables.css



Here is where you can theme your site. You can retheme the whole site with just these.



### public/images



Here is where you should stick all your images. Inside of your markdown, refer to images in this folder as `./images/`.



Note this site doesn't use `next/image` because that requires the server component.



### public/images/author.jpg



Your image. If you call it this, you won't have to change any code. If you need to change it, it's in `pages/index.js`.



### public/images/social-share-cover.jpg



The image that will be used if someone shares your website to Twitter/Facebook/etc. If you call it this, you won't have to change any code. If you do need to change it, it's in `pages/index.js`



### public/images/course-icon.png



The image at the top of the course. If you call it this, you won't have to change any code. If you do need to change it, it's in `pages/index.js`



## Favicon



Just replace the favicon\* files and the apple-touch-icon.png in the public/images directory. If you have a PNG, [favicon.io](https://favicon.io) will generate these files for you. If you don't want favicons, just remove the references to them in `pages/_app.js`.



## Lessons



All your markdown lesson files will go in `lessons/`. They **must** be organized an named this way:



The folders must be named `01-section-one-name`, `02-section-two-name`, `03-section-three`, etc.



The lessons are then grouped inside of these, the lessons are ordered by letters, `A-lesson-one.md`, `B-lesson-two.md`, `C-lesson-three.md`, etc. This numbering scheme matches how Frontend Masters organizes their content.



The titles of your lessons and sections are generated from the folder and lesson names (and can be overridden.) The first, organizing part of the name is stripped (the `01-` part of `01-section-one` and the `A-` part of `A-lesson-one`), the hyphens are turned into spaces (`section-one` becomes `section one`) and then those are run through [title-case](https://github.com/blakeembrey/change-case#titlecase) (so `section one` becomes `Section One`.) If you need to override these, use the frontmatter (explained below.)



The folder and lesson names are also used for the slugs. `02-section-two/C-lesson-three.md` becomes `yoursite.com/lessons/section-two/lesson-three`.



Each of these lessons can have a [frontmatter](https://github.com/jonschlinkert/gray-matter#readme) for the following properties



- _title_ – If you want the title to be different from the file name, you can specify here what that title should be. Frequently this useful for things where the capitalization would be off e.g. TailwindCSS instead of Tailwindcss. Optional.

- _description_ – If you want to give individual lessons descriptions for SEO and for Frontend Masters, you can write a brief description here.

- _keywords_ - If you want to give individual lessons keywords for SEO purposes, write a comma separated list



🤖: now the course starter can auto-generate the description and keywords for you using ChatGPT. See below how to.



Be aware because of how the numbers and letters are stripped out, it is possible to have ambigious paths. `01-welcome/A-intro.md` and `03-welcome/D-intro.md` would resolve to the same thing and only the first one would be visitable.



## meta.json



Each **section** (e.g. inside of `03-section-three` folder) folder can have a meta.json file, and is totally optional.



- _title_ – an override for the title of the section. Frequently useful for capitalization e.g. `JS Tools` instead of `Js Tools`.

- _icon_ – so you can set the icon used in the home page and the header. These icons are pulled from [the free Font Awesome v5 icons](https://fontawesome.com/v5.15/icons). If you want [fa-hammer](https://fontawesome.com/v5.15/icons/hammer), use "hammer" as the value for icon.



## highlight.js Theme



The code blocks use [Highlight.js](https://highlightjs.org/static/demo/). By default it will use `a11y-light` as the theme for the code blocks. Change the CSS import in `pages/_app.js` to the theme you want to use.



## GitHub Pages / GitHub Actions



By default this repo works with GitHub Pages (classic). Just make sure you set the `productionBaseUrl` in the course.json to the name of the repo.



It also includes a GitHub Action to automatically deploy to your `gh-pages` branch. Just make sure that your repo has GitHub Pages (classic) enabled and the branch is set to `gh-pages`. If you're not deploying to GitHub Pages go ahead and delete the `.github` directory.



By default the GitHub Action looks for a `main` branch, so be sure you're using that instead of `master`.



If you want a custom domain, make sure you uncomment the `fqdn` field in [.github/workflows/next.yaml](https://github.com/btholt/next-course-starter/blob/main/.github/workflows/next.yaml) file and put your custom domain. If you don't do that and only set it up with the GitHub web GUI, every deploy will break the custom domain.



### GitHub Pages Instructions



These instructions assume you've followed the setup instructions above and have a cloned version of this repo locally.



1. Create a new (public) remote repository in your GitHub Account (e.g. fem-javascript-fundamentals).

1. Grant `Read and write permissions` for Workflows under Actions > General > Workflow Permissions.

1. Update the `productionBaseUrl` in the `course.json` file to match the name of the repository.

1. Push to the new repository. You should see the `Deploy NextJS Course Site` workflow run under the Actions tab.

1. Configure GitHub Pages: Settings > Pages > Deploy from a Branch. Select the `gh-pages` branch.

1. Once the `pages-build-deployment` action completes, you should see your site at `https://USERNAME.github.io/REPO_NAME`.



_Future pushes to the main branch will automatically trigger a new deployment._



## Example Sites



- [This repo itself](https://btholt.github.io/next-course-starter/)

- [Complete Intro to React v6](https://btholt.github.io/next-react-v6/)

- [Complete Intro to React v7](https://btholt.github.io/complete-intro-to-react-v7/)

- [Complete Intro to Web Dev v3](https://btholt.github.io/complete-intro-to-web-dev-v3/)



## npm commands



- `npm run dev` - Next's dev command. Start a local dev server. Note if you have a productionBasePath set in your course.json, your dev server will respect that (so you don't mess up your paths in production.)

- `npm run build` - Build your site for production. This will still include the Next.js server run time. Use this if you're using something like Vercel to host your site.

- `npm run start` - Start an already-built server.

- `npm run csv` – Will generate the CSV of the metadata from your course. Note you may have to run build first, depending on your csvPath.

- `npm run seo` – Using ChatGPT, every file that does not have a description, ChatGPT will generate a description and keywords and write them to the file. Requires you to set a valid `OPENAI_API_KEY` (which means having a paid OpenAI account) using a [.env](https://github.com/motdotla/dotenv) or just by setting it in the environment. If a description already exists, this will skip it.



## Analytics



By default this doesn't generate any analytics. If you are creating a Frontend Masters course and would like a weekly report of analytics, contact me (Brian Holt) and I'll give you a snippet to drop on your page (though fair warning, I will also have access to your data, if that bothers you.)



Otherwise I'm pretty pleased with [Simple Analytics](referral.simpleanalytics.com/brian) (this is a referral link, free month for me and free month for you); I've been using them for my courses personally.



## License



The **code** is this repo is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.



I include the CC-BY-NC-4.0 license for the content; this is what I recommend you license your **content** under: anyone can use and share the content but they cannot sell it; only you can.