Skip to main content

Build and validate

Our release workflow builds theme assets and validates them with GScan before packaging for upload.

Build (CSS and JS)​

From the theme repo root:

yarn dev

This runs Gulp: it compiles CSS (PostCSS with easy-import, autoprefixer, cssnano) and JS (concat + uglify) into assets/built/. With yarn dev, Gulp also watches for changes and triggers livereload.

One-off build (no watch): we run the same Gulp tasks. Typically yarn dev includes watch; for zip, yarn zip triggers a full build first (see below).

Where built assets go​

  • assets/built/screen.css (from assets/css/screen.css + imports like general/, site/, blog/, misc/) — Single stylesheet loaded by default.hbs.
  • assets/built/main.min.js (from assets/js/*.js, concatenated + minified) — Theme script loaded with defer in default.hbs.

The theme loads these via {{asset "built/screen.css"}} and {{asset "built/main.min.js"}}. Built artifacts are generated from source; we edit source CSS/JS and rebuild.

Validate (GScan)​

Validation runs Ghost’s theme checker:

yarn test

This runs gscan . and reports compatibility and best-practice issues. We fix reported errors so the theme passes before packaging.

Package for upload (zip)​

Packaging uses yarn zip to produce a theme zip for Ghost Admin (Settings → Design → Upload theme):

yarn zip

This produces:

  1. Runs a full build (CSS + JS)
  2. Creates manny-roy.zip (or the name from package.json) in the repo root, including only the files Ghost needs (templates, partials, assets, package.json, etc.)

We upload that zip in Ghost Admin. For rollback, we keep a copy of the previous zip and re-upload it if needed (see Deployment).

Summary​

  • yarn dev — Build CSS/JS and watch; for local iteration.
  • yarn test — Run GScan; gate before packaging.
  • yarn zip — Build and create theme zip for upload.