Last updated January 25, 2022

The Dev Center CLI lets authors edit and preview Dev Center articles locally.

Installation

Set up Ruby on your local machine. Then install the Dev Center CLI gem:

$ gem install devcenter

You’ll also need the Heroku CLI if you want to save your articles to Dev Center.

Pull your article

Download a local copy of an article with devcenter pull followed by the article URL:

$ devcenter pull https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dev-center-cli
"Dev Center CLI" article saved as ~/.../dev-center-cli.md

This will save a dev-center-cli.md text file in your local directory.

Edit and preview locally

Open the file with your text editor: you will see that the file includes some metadata followed by the article content in markdown format.

The following command will open a preview in your default browser:

$ devcenter preview dev-center-cli
Live preview for error-pages available in  http://127.0.0.1:3000/dev-center-cli
It will refresh when you save ~/.../dev-center-cli.md
Press Ctrl+C to exit...

Now start editing the article’s content: the preview will auto-refresh whenever you save the file, so you can see the content you’re editing and its preview side by side.

Metadata

The markdown file includes some metadata fields. You can edit title, but never overwrite the id field: you’ll need it to save your changes in Dev Center.

Stop the preview

To stop the preview command, press Ctrl+C.

Save the article to Dev Center

Save your local changes to Dev Center using the devcenter push command:

$ devcenter push dev-center-cli.md

Additional help

Get a list of all the available commands with:

$ devcenter help

To get help for a specific command and its available options, e.g: preview:

$ devcenter help preview

Issues and pull requests

The Dev Center CLI is open source, you can access its repo to get the code, report issues or send pull requests.