Step by Step
It may be useful to run the development docs locally when working on a forked version of semantic, as the docs themselves help in testing out changes to ui components.
1. Install Node
Semantic docs are written in DocPad which requires NodeJS.
2. Fork Semantic
3. Install Dependencies
Running update inside the local directory will grab all packages in package.json in the root of the project.
4. Start Your Server
Docpad should now run an instance of semantic-ui.com locally you can access at http://localhost:9778
5. (Optional) Install Karma
Unit tests are written in Jasmine, but are run using a test runner called Karma. To install karma you need to grab the npm package.
Using Grunt
Watch Changes in Source
If you are working on fixing a UI component that is part of Semantic, your best bet is to work actively on the file in /src/{type}/{elementname}/ while running a watch script from grunt. This will rebuild the docs after you make changes, so you can see if you have corrected the issue you are fixing.
To see exactly what this is doing you can check out our commented gruntfile
The watch task is the default grunt task for Semantic, so you can start it quite simply.
Run Unit Tests
Tests will automatically run with grunt watch if you have started karma
You can also run the test suite manually
Build Semantic Packages Locally
For convenience there is also a separate grunt command for building minified, packaged, and compressed versions of the library.