Stacks is Stack Overflow’s design system. It includes the resources needed to create consistent, predictable interfaces and workflows that conform to Stack Overflow’s principles, design language, and best practices.

Our documentation is built with Stacks itself, using its immutable, atomic classes and components.

The Stacks website documents:

Product

• Semantic and accessible component markup
• Cross-browser compatible Less / CSS
• An icon library

Email

• Email templates & components

Stacks documentation can be found at https://stackoverflow.design/

Table of contents

• Using Stacks
• Building Stacks
• Linting Stacks
• Testing Stacks
• Releasing Stacks
• Bugs and feature requests
• Contributing
• License

Using Stacks

Using Stacks is outlined in our usage guidelines.

Building Stacks

To contribute to Stacks documentation or its CSS library, you’ll need to build Stacks locally. View our building guidelines.

Having trouble getting these steps to work? Open an issue with a setup label.

Linting Stacks

Run all lint suites by running:

Lint the styles (stylelint) by running:

Lint the typescript source code (eslint) via running:

Lint the source code format (prettier) via running:

Testing Stacks

Run all test suites by running:

Unit/Component Tests

Unit/Component tests are written with DOM Testing Library. Please follow the library's principles and documentation to write tests.

Stacks uses Web Test Runner and Playwright to run tests in a real browser context.

Execute the unit/component tests suite by running:

or if you prefer watch mode run:

Visual Regression Tests

Prerequisite: In order to pull and upload baseline images you need to have git lfs installed in your local machine. Please follow this guide to install that.

This Web Test Runner plugin is used to run visual regression tests. DOM Testing Library. Visual regression tests end with this suffix *.visual.test.ts.

Execute the visual regression tests suite by running:

Update the visual baseline via:

npm run test:visual:update

Failing tests (including diffs) can be found under screenshots/[browser]/failed/ folders.

Releasing a new version of Stacks

Stacks uses Semantic Versioning, is distributed via npm, and publishes release notes on Github. Follow the steps below to release a new version of Stacks.

Bump the version number

npm version [major | minor | patch]

Push the new tag

git push && git push --tags

Create release notes on Github

1. Visit https://github.com/StackExchange/Stacks/releases/new
2. Choose your new version from the "Choose a tag" dropdown
3. Click "Generate release notes"
4. Cleanup and complete the release notes
   • Prominently mention any breaking changes, if applicable
   • Include a "What's Changed" section in the release notes
   • Mention significant bug fixes
   • Mention new features
   • Mention significant under-the-hood changes that could impact consumers

Ship your newly created version to npm

Merge develop into production and push

git checkout production && git merge develop && git push

Push the updated docs site

Head to Netlify, navigate to the Stacks overview, click on "Production deploys", and select "Deploy site" from the "Trigger deploy" dropdown.

Bugs and feature requests

Have a bug or feature request? First search existing or closed issues to make sure the issue hasn’t been noted yet. If not, review our issue guidelines for submitting a bug report or feature request.

Contributing

If you’d like to contribute to Stacks, please read through our contribution guidelines. Included are directions for opening issues, coding standards, and notes on development.

License

Code and documentation copyright 2017-2022 Stack Exchange, Inc and released under the MIT License.