Frontend

The frontend presents user-facing web pages on pkg.go.dev.

For additional information on functionality of the frontend, see the design document.

Development

The main program lives in cmd/frontend. The bulk of the code lives in internal/frontend.

Experiments

Set environment variable GO_DISCOVERY_CONFIG_DYNAMIC to the filename of a file containing experiments in YAML format. The file can be empty, but it must exist. Example:

experiments:
  - name: sidenav
    rollout: 100
    description: Display documentation index on the left sidenav.

Running

You can run the frontend locally like so:

go run ./cmd/frontend [-dev] [-direct_proxy] [-local .]

• The -dev flag reloads templates on each page load.

The frontend can use one of three datasources:

• Postgres database
• Proxy service
• Local filesystem

The Datasource interface implementation is available at internal/datasource.go.

You can use the -direct_proxy flag to run the frontend with its datasource as the proxy service. This allows you to run the frontend without setting up a postgres database.

Alternatively, you can run pkg.go.dev with a local database. See instructions on how to set up and populate your local database with packages of your choice.

You can then run the frontend with: go run ./cmd/frontend

You can also use -local flag to run the frontend with an in-memory datasource populated with modules loaded from your local filesystem. This allows you to run the frontend without setting up a database and to view documentation of local modules without requiring a proxy. -local accepts a GOPATH-like string containing paths of modules to load into memory.

If you add, change or remove any inline scripts in templates, run devtools/cmd/csphash to update the hashes. Running all.bash will do that as well.