Hey DEV Community👋🏽
What are some examples of open-source projects that have great READMEs? Specifically, projects that:
Describe what the proj...
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Hi, there! 👋
I created ember-container-query and am happy with how its README turned out. I like it for these reasons:
<summary>
tags to hide details and not overwhelm first-time visitorsijlee2 / ember-container-query
Make container queries that harness the power of Ember Octane.
ember-container-query
Make container queries that harness the power of Ember Octane.
Open the demo app to see
ember-container-query
in action. (There's even a 404 page!)Installation
Use FastBoot?⚠️
This addon uses nullish coalescing operator
??
. If you use FastBoot (withNode < v14.0
) and only support browsers that natively support ??, you will run into a build error:To prevent this, please make sure to add
node: 'current'
to yourconfig/targets.js
file.Applications
Where can you use container queries? Here are real-life (and some theoretical) applications!
Create reusable components that are independent of screen size♻️
Components form a core of an Ember app. We love components!
With…
I spend a lot of time in Postwoman's readme.
hoppscotch / hoppscotch
👽 A free, fast and beautiful API request builder used by 75k+ developers. https://hoppscotch.io
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Table of contents
Features✨
Methods:
GET
- Retrieve information about the REST API resourceHEAD
- Retrieve response headers identical to those of a GET request, but without the response body.POST
- Create a REST API resourcePUT
- Update a REST API resourceDELETE
- Delete a REST…I do like READMEs that have this hero-like header part as shown in this example. It looks professional and I don't have the feeling that this is just made for experts.
Thanks for sharing, Liyas—indeed, it's very detailed.
Did you take inspiration from other projects? How did you cmake the decision to structure your README the way you did?
I remember finding a public gist which had most of the sections for a README boilerplate. I don't have the link to it with me now.
Wow that's a really great project!
Not in context with readme but if you check how Kent Dodds writes his issues and also guidelines for newbies, it's definitely inspiring in context of knowledge-transfer. I follow him to see how he transfers his learning to newbies and others. His github and twitter activity on that part is amazing.
I like the emoji in your titles, makes the README entertaining, well done 👍
I can't off the top of my head think of a specific project with a great README, but a platform I associate with great READMEs is npmjs.com. The convention there seems to be "lead by example." It seems to me anyway that usually the first item in the doc for a node module is an example instantiation of call of whatever it is. Contrast this with UNIX man pages, where it's almost my reflex to press G (go to bottom of man page) which is where there's usually one or more usage examples, above which is an exhaustive list of all possible command switches or function parameters. (cw pun ahead) You might say the npmjs.com philosophy is "lead by example" while the UNIX man pages philosophy is "bury the lede."
I made one recently. It's for my icon open-source project called Neu Icons. At the beginning of writing the README, I found many issues about how I can make it visually as I want. But time goes by I learned how the markdown works and so on. And now I am pretty happy with it.
The importance of writing README for me have these aspects:
Good tips, thanks Roy!
Having a monorepo like ours, didn't actually made it easy to compose a single entry README. You can't for example display an "installation guide" if the repo contains many installation guides.
After some thoughts, I went for an introduction and a list of all its apps, components, functions etc. It also displays a link to the developer documentation.
Any ideas of improvements?
Hey David—when I was on the Bundler core team (now a part of RubyGems), we had several Markdown files for things like contributing guidelines to installation instructions. In our case, the documentation site was its own repo, but we linked out to it from the main repo.
It seems you're doing this now and I really like how organized all the various component links are displayed. I'd be interested to hear from others who have a similar use case!
Thanks Stephanie for your feedback 🙏 I am really happy to hear that the organization of this entry readme file looks alright. It took a bit of time to figure it out. We even only added recently the CHANGELOGs uri, thanks to a PR of a contributor (Roy).
My programming language, Blue, doesn't use the README, but it does have a pretty detailed documentation page: kiraprograms.com/blue/help.html. It describes the project on the main page: kiraprograms.com/blue/help.html, and it doesn't have instructions for installation because it's 100% in the browser. I spent over half of the time just working on the documentation, which, in theory, could also be used as a tutorial. It's probably not much compared to massive projects made by teams of programmers, but it took a while consitering that I did it totally on my own.
Thanks for sharing! Since READMEs are generally associated with projects that are hosted on sites like GitHub, I'm curious—is Blue on GitHub? Do you take contributions from external collaborators? I'd love to hear how you made the decisions to share your project this way!
It does have a GitHub repository but the README there isn't very great because I made the syntax highlighting on my own, and Blue is not a language in GitHub's syntax highliting. It isn't a very big project so I only did it on my own. Since it's small, I am happy to take other people's suggestions, but don't need other people to actually write more code unless I know them personally. You can see the GitHub repository at github.com/i8sumPi/blue!
Awesome, thanks for sharing!
I have spent a lot of time on this one. I hope you can give feedbacks on this. (I find my
README
great btw c:)Thanks for sharing!
How did you come up with your README format? And regarding contributions—do you get them frequently? Do they need to be formatted or structured in a particular way? What about issues?
I made recently one of my hobby projects open source. It is an Angular component, you can check its README here:
github.com/milantenk/ngx-interacti...
What I held important to have
I love the GIF and link to live demo!!! That's an awesome concept. Thank you for sharing!
Very helpful—thank you for sharing!
Goal well achieved 🎉
Additionally, it helps to have a "Tech Stack" section somewhere at the top near "Getting Started":
github.com/kriasoft/nodejs-api-sta...
github.com/kriasoft/react-firebase...
Agreed. These READMEs are excellent!
I really like how they outline the repo structure and the requirements before installing the software. I'm also a huge fan of the contributing section and how they guide users through each next step.
I'd recommend slateJS . It's WYSIWYG editor with which you can build even Google Docs. Have a look.
Is there a README for this project? What makes it a good README?
This one's mine, pretty simple but I like putting in diagrams/images.
sakshatshinde / Plei
A game launcher with no bloat
Plei
A game launcher with no bloat
This project is ready for the launchers given below!
Why is this a thing?
As new game launchers came into being it increasingly got annoying to keep track of all the games over different stores/platform. I wanted to make a unified front where users can access all their games, including the one with no launchers. The goal behind this launcher is to be simple, minimilistic and bloat-free
How to install?
How to install? (for devs)
This installation assumed you have python 3.X installed. Get python here
getuikit.com
What do you like about the README?