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README.md

Welcome to New Help!

Here are some instructions on how to get started with New Help...

How to contribute

Expensify is an open source app, with its public Github repo hosted at https://github.com/Expensify/App. The newhelp.expensify.com website is a part of that same open source project. You can contribute to this helpsite in one of two ways:

The hard way: local dev environment

If you are a developer comfortable working on the command line, you can edit these files as follows:

  1. Fork https://github.com/Expensify/App repo
  • ...tbd...
  1. Install Homebrew: https://brew.sh/
  2. Install rbenv using brew:
  • brew install rbenv
  1. Install ruby v3.3.4 using
  • rbenv install 3.3.4
  1. Set the your default ruby version using
  • rbenv global 3.3.4
  1. check to ensure that your global ruby version is 3.3.4
  • ruby -v
  1. Install Jekyll and bundler gem
  • cd help
  • gem install jekyll bundler
  1. Install node dependencies with npm
  • npm install
  1. Create a branch for your changes
  2. Make your changes
  3. Locally build and test your changes (they build to the /help/_site/ directory):
  • bundle exec jekyll build
  1. Push your changes

The easy way: edit on Github

If you don't want to set up your own local dev environment, feel free to just edit the help materials directly from Github:

  1. Open whatever file you want.
  2. Replace github.com with github.dev in the URL
  3. Edit away!

How to add a page

The current design of NewHelp.expensify.com is only to have a very small handful pages (one for each "product"), each of which is a markdown file stored in /help using the product template (defined in /help/_layouts/product.html). Accordingly, it's very unlikely you'll be adding a new page.

The goal is to use a system named Jekyll to do the heavy lifting of not just converting that Markdown into HTML, but also allowing for deep linking of the headers, auto-linking mentions of those titles elsewhere, and a ton more. So, just write a basic Markdown file, and it should handle the rest.

How to preview the site online

Every PR pushed by an authorized Expensify employee or representative will automatically trigger a "build" of the site using a Github Action. This will follow these steps to:

  1. Start a new Ubuntu server
  2. Check out the repo
  3. Install Ruby and Jekyll
  4. Build the entire site using Jekyll
  5. Create a "preview" of the newly built site in Cloudflare
  6. Record a link to that preview in the PR

How to deploy the site for real

Whenever a PR that touches the /help directory is merged, it will re-run the build just like before. However, it will detect that this build is being run from the main branch, and thus push the changes to the production Cloudflare environment -- meaning, it will replace the contents hosted at https://newhelp.expensify.com