How to Work on Practice Projects

Our practice projects use a step-based approach to teach concepts to campers. A project will consist of multiple files, which we refer to as “steps”. These files are named by the challenge ID, to avoid issues with the translation flow. Unfortunately, this makes it difficult to find the file associated with a specific step.

We’ve built a challenge editor tool that helps remedy this. This tool allows you to navigate the available projects, and the steps for each project (in order). There’s also an embedded code editor you can use to work on the files directly.

Using the Challenge Editor

These instructions will tell you how to use our challenge editor tool to work on the practice projects.

Starting the Editor

To start the editor, make sure you are in the root freeCodeCamp directory. Then, run pnpm run challenge-editor to start both the client and the API that powers the editor.

The client will run on port 3300, so you can access it at http://localhost:3300. The API runs on port 3200, to avoid conflicts with the learn client and server. This will allow you to run the freeCodeCamp application at the same time as the editor, so you can test your changes locally.

Navigating the Editor

The default view will list the available superblocks - these are the certifications. Click on the certification link you want to work on.

This will take you to the list of blocks. These are the practice projects. Click on the project link you want to work on.

This will take you to a list of steps for the project. If you are working on an existing step, you can click on the step link to open the editor. If you are adding or removing steps, click the Use the step tools link to switch to the step tools for that challenge.

Editing Steps

When you click on a step, you’ll be taken to the editor. This is a basic text editor that offers syntax highlighting.

After you have made your changes, click the Save Changes button to save your changes. You will get a browser alert letting you know that your changes are ready to commit. Note that you’ll need to use git manually to stage and commit your files - this tool will not do that for you.

Step Tools

When you click the Use the step tools link, you’ll be taken to the step tools page. This allows you to add or remove steps from the project.

Create Next Step

Clicking this button will add a new step at the end of the project. This step will use the previous step’s code as the seed.

Create Empty Steps

Enter the number of steps you want to add in the input. Then, clicking the button will create many empty steps at the end of the project.

Insert Step

Enter the step number that you want to add. Then, click the Insert Step button to add the step. The following steps will be re-ordered.

Delete Step

Enter the step number you want to delete. Then click the Delete Step button to remove that step. This will automatically update the step numbers for the remaining steps.

Update Step Titles

You should not have to use this tool unless you’ve manually deleted or added steps. This tool will reorder the step numbers.

Using the Scripts Manually

If you want to work on the steps manually, in your local IDE, you can run the step management scripts directly.

The tools/challenge-helper-scripts folder contains tools to help facilitate the creation and maintenance of the freeCodeCamp project-based curriculum.

Create a New Project

Change directory to tools/challenge-helper-scripts and run pnpm run create-project. This opens up a command line UI that guides you through the process. Once that has finished, there should be a new challenge in the English curriculum that you can use for the first step of the project. For example, if you created a project called test-project in the Responsive Web Design certification, it would be in curriculum/challenges/english/01-responsive-web-design/test-project.

If you want to create new steps, the following tools simplify that process.

create-next-step

A one-off script that will automatically add the next step based on the last step in the project. The challenge seed code will use the previous step’s challenge seed code.

How to Run the Script

Change to the directory of the project.
Run the following command:

pnpm run create-next-step

create-empty-steps

A one-off script that automatically adds a specified number of steps. The challenge seed code for all steps created will be empty.

Note: This script also runs update-step-titles.

How to Run the Script

Change to the directory of the project.
Run the following command:

pnpm run create-empty-steps X # where X is the number of steps to create.

insert-step

A one-off script that automatically adds a new step at a specified position, incrementing all subsequent steps (both their titles and in their meta.json). The challenge seed code will use the previous step’s challenge seed code with the editable region markers (ERMs) removed.

Note: This script also runs update-step-titles.

How to Run the Script

Change to the directory of the project.
Run the following command:

pnpm run insert-step X # where X is the position to insert the new step.

delete-step

A one-off script that deletes an existing step, decrementing all subsequent steps (both their titles and in their meta.json)

Note: This script also runs update-step-titles.

How to Run the Script

Change to the directory of the project.
Run the following command:

pnpm run delete-step X # where X is the step number to be deleted.

update-step-titles

A one-off script that automatically updates the frontmatter in a project’s markdown files so that they are consistent with the project’s meta.json. It ensures that each step’s title (and dashedName) matches the meta’s challengeOrder.

How to Run the Script

Change to the directory of the project.
Run the following command:

pnpm run update-step-titles

repair-meta

One-off script to parse the step names from the project and update the meta.json order to reflect those steps. Useful if you’ve accidentally lost the changes to the meta.json file when adding/removing steps.

How to Run the Script

Change to the directory of the project.
Run the following command:

pnpm run repair-meta

rename-challenges

The script is to be used if the step-based project has files that have challenges ids and filenames that do not match.

How to Run the Script

Be in the root directory
Run the following command:

pnpm run rename-challenges

sync-i18n

When you add or remove a step from a step-based project, this creates a mismatch in the list of steps between the English project and the project in other languages. So now you need to use this tool to bring the other languages in sync.

If you have changed tests or seed code of the steps in a way that is not compatible with the previous version, you first need to delete the changed files or the whole project folder for the other languages.

How to Run the Script

Note: You need to have node and typescript installed globally.

Be in the root directory
Run the following command

ts-node tools/scripts/sync-i18n.ts

What the script does in detail

The script identify the English files as the source of truth using the challengeId as key. Then it checks other languages for files that do not longer exist in English and removes them. Then it creates any file that are present in English but not in other languages. Finally it checks that each challenge file in the other languages has the same dashedName as the English files.

Proposing a Pull Request (PR)

After you’ve committed your changes, check here for how to open a Pull Request.