---
title: Contributing
description: Learn how to run docs.page locally and help contribute to the project.
---

# Contributing

Learn how to run docs.page locally and help contribute to the project.

## Running locally

Firstly, fork the [https://github.com/invertase/docs.page](https://github.com/invertase/docs.page) repository.
Once forked, clone the repository locally:

```bash
git clone git@github.com:invertase/docs.page.git
```

Within the directory, install the projects dependencies with NPM/Yarn:

```bash
npm install
# or
yarn
```

Before running, you must add a GitHub personal access token as an environment variable. This token allows API calls
to be made via GitHub. Create a `.env` file at the root of the project:

```txt title=.env
GITHUB_PAT=ABC...
```

> You can create a new token on your [GitHub settings](https://github.com/settings/tokens).

Now run the project:

```bash
npm run dev
```

## Structure

Aside from the projects homepage, all requests are sent via the `src/pages/[owner]/[name]/[[...slug]].tsx` file. If production a cached version of the statically generated HTML output will be served,
or created then cached. In development however, the page is built on each request. Therefore load times might seem a bit slower than expected.

> Learn more about this at [Next.js](https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/data-fetching#getstaticprops-static-generation).

Each request is sent via the `getStaticProps` function, which performs a number of tasks:

- Extracting the expected GitHub repository from the request.
- Extracting, or fetching the GitHub reference for the request.
- Identifying whether the reference is a reference (pull request, branch, commit).
- Fetching the contents of the page via the GitHub API.
- Transforming the page content into MDX.
- Handling errors, such as render problems or 404 requests.