Provided in the slate repo is a Dockerfile you can use to run slate using Docker, as well as providing pre-built images on Docker Hub. Docker is similar to Vagrant in that it provides a reproducible, portable development environment using virtualization, however it does not provide a full VM, rather piggy backing off the host, allowing for a slimmer installation profile than Vagrant / full VMs. However, Docker does come with a number of its own terms, and for beginners, we recommend looking at this Glossary to familiarize yourself with some of them.

• Docker, see this page for installing Docker Desktop.

1. Fork this repository on Github.
2. Clone your forked repository (not our original one) to your hard drive with git clone https://github.com/YOURUSERNAME/slate.git
3. cd slate
4. Grab the slate image (docker pull slatedocs/slate) or build the docker image for the repository (docker build . -t slatedocs/slate).

Note: If you are using the pre-built images for Slate, you may wish to remove all files other than the source directory from your repository.

To use Docker to just build your site, run:

docker run --rm --name slate -v $(pwd)/build:/srv/slate/build -v $(pwd)/source:/srv/slate/source slatedocs/slate build

After this command completes, you should see the built artifacts for your site in the $(pwd)/build directory, which you can then statically serve for your website.

Note: You may omit the final build argument and get the same result. By default, if given no command, the Dockerfile will run build.

If you wish to run the development server for Slate to aid in working on the site, run:

docker run --rm --name slate -p 4567:4567 -v $(pwd)/source:/srv/slate/source slatedocs/slate serve

and you will be able to access your site at http://localhost:4567 until you stop the running container process.

The provided Docker images contain the full Slate environment and all related files. This means that you may provide as much or as little as you want into the container while utilizing defaults. For example, if you only wanted to include your markdown sources and not overwrite the default JS, CSS, etc. you may wish to use the following mount options:

-v $(pwd)/source/index.html.md:/srv/slate/source/index.html.md -v $(pwd)/source/includes:/srv/slate/source/includes

The next step is to learn how to edit source/index.html.md to change the content of your docs. Once you're done, you might want to think about deploying your docs.