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Pages Empty Starter

This repository provides an empty starter template for Yext Pages. This starter is recommended if you want to build from scratch or are following a track that requires the empty starter.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

  1. Have the Yext CLI installed: https://hitchhikers.yext.com/guides/cli-getting-started-resources/01-install-cli/

  2. Have Deno installed, version 1.21.0 or later: https://deno.land/manual/getting_started/installation

  3. Have node installed, version 17: https://nodejs.org/en/download/

  4. Have a Yext account. You can sign up for a free account here: https://hitchhikers.yext.com/create-playground-account

Recommended: Set up with pages new

Once you have the prerequisites installed, we recommend running yext pages new which will guide you through the setup flow. Alternatively, you can clone this repo directly by following the directions below.

Clone this repo and install dependencies

git clone https://github.com/yext/empty-starter
cd empty-starter
npm install

Recommended Development Flow

While developing locally, run the following command:

npm run dev

This command will start a Vite-powered dev server that will enable hot-reloading. Additionally, the command will generate a localData directory that contains a subset of your Knowledge Graph data. This command is automatically in "dynamic" mode, which means it will pull data updates automatically from your Knowledge graph, so real-time data changes in your Yext account will be reflected in your local dev site.

NOTE: Whenever you make changes to your stream definitions, you must re-run npm run dev for the system to update the features.json and the required entities to power your site.

Before committing your code, we recommend running the following command:

npm run build:serve

This command will generate a production build of your site, so you can ensure there are no build errors or unexpected behavior. This build step replicates the production build environment used in the Yext system, and serves your data at localhost:8000.

In practice, development builds (via npm run dev) and production builds compile and bundle assets differently. For local development, ES Modules are loaded directly by the browser, allowing fast iteration during local development and also allows for hot module replacement (HMR). Other things like CSS are also loaded directly by the browser, including linking to sourcemaps. During a production build all of the different files are compiled (via ESBuild for jsx/tsx) and minified, creating assets as small as possible so that the final html files load quickly when served to a user. Tree-shaking also occurs during the build step, in which any unused dependencies are removed from your final build.

Other Useful commands

yext init - Authenticates the Yext CLI with your Yext account

yext pages generate-test-data - pull an example set of localData from your account. This command is packaged within `npm run dev'.

npm run build - Runs a production build against your localData: part one of npm run build:serve

npm run serve - Runs a local server against your production-built files: part two of npm run build:serve

npm run fmt - Automatically formats all code

npm run lint - Run ESLint to check for errors and warnings

Repository Layout

root
└───localData
└───sites-config
│   │   ci.json
└───src
│   │   index.css
│   │
│   └───components
│   │
│   └───templates
│       │   location.tsx
│       │   robots.ts
│       │   static.tsx
│   │
│   └───types

localData

Contains example stream documents that are used while local developing. By default this repo contains example files that work with the provided example templates. You can generate real stream documents specific to your Yext account via yext pages generate-test-data.

NOTE: You normally wouldn't want to check in the localData folder as it's only used for local dev. It is gitignored by default.

sites-config

Contains a single ci.json file. This file defines how the Yext CI system will build your project. It is not used during local dev. However, it is used when running a local production build (i.e. yext pages build).

NOTE: A features.json file will automatically be generated during CI build for you based on the template configs defined in your templates. If this file doesn't exist then yext pages build will implicitly generate a new one when it calls npm run build:local (defined in sites-config/ci.json). In the recommended devleopment flow with npm run dev, the features.json will be automatically generated.

NOTE: After changing your stream definitions, you should rerun yext pages generate and yext pages generate-text-data to ensure your local build pulls in the required data from the Knowledge Graph

src

components

This is where all of your custom components may live. This folder is not required and you can set up your own custom folder structure for your own components in any way you'd like, as long as it lives in the src directory.

templates

Required. This is where your actual templates live. There are effectively two types of components:

  1. stream-based templates: those that have an exported config
  2. static templates: those that don't have an exported config.

types

Here you can define any custom TypeScript types you need.

index.css

Not required. In this example this sets up Tailwind CSS.

vite.config.js

Vite is now a first class member of the starter! This file defines any custom Vite configuration you want, giving you full control over your setup. Specifically, it will allows users to pass additional configuration options to the vite-plugin-yext-sites-ssg plugin when they become more widely available.

Everything else

The rest of the files are basic config setup common to many other React projects. In this example we've enabled:

  1. Tailwind CSS (which leverages PostCSS) - used for easy styling
  2. ESLint - catches errors in your code
  3. Prettier - formats your code (you can add .prettierrc to override any default settings)
  4. TypeScript - adds typing to Javascript for a better developer experience