This pre-release guidance is aimed at Design System team members. If you're an external contributor who needs to create a pre-release, please contact the Design System team and we'll do it for you.
Before you publish a pre-release, you need to have committed a code change to GOV.UK Frontend. Then follow these instructions.
Use pre-releases when you:
- work on developing a component or pattern for the GOV.UK Design System
- want to trial an experimental feature (guidance on trialling experimental features is in development)
⚠️ Your projects should never depend on a pre-released GOV.UK Frontend package. This is because someone could remove the GitHub branch containing the pre-release package at any time. For this reason, never use a pre-released package in a production setting.
When you pre-release GOV.UK Frontend, this creates a GitHub branch. This branch contains the GOV.UK Frontend /package directory with your trial changes.
Projects can point to this branch in their package.json, instead of to the published GOV.UK Frontend npm package. No changes are published to the GOV.UK Frontend npm package as part of this process.
-
Run
git checkout -b BRANCH-NAMEto switch to the branch you want to pre-release. -
Run
nvm useto make sure you’re using the right version of Node.js and npm. -
Run
npm installto make sure you have the latest dependencies installed. -
Run
npm run pre-releaseto create and push a new branch that contains your changes. This process may take a few moments and will display aSuccess!message.
-
If you need to update an existing project to use the pre-release, copy the command that displays after the
Success!message. -
Navigate to the project in the command line and run the success notification command. Running this command makes the project point to the pre-release branch, instead of to the published GOV.UK Frontend npm package. You can now preview your trial changes to GOV.UK Frontend.