Bootstrap

Chapter 5. Using Bootstrap

GitHub Project

Like a lot of great open source projects, the power of Bootstrap comes not just from the developers at the core of the project but also from the development community that supports it. GitHub is a large code repository for projects, and at time of writing, Bootstrap is the most popular project. With over 42,000 stars and over 10,000 forks, the project is bustling with activity. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, if you want to use Bootstrap, you can simply download the .zip archive from the site, or you can download using git.

For the uninitated, git is a free and open source version control system. Bootstrap and a host of other projects manage everything using GitHub, which is an online code repository for git projects. To download the source for Bootstrap, run the following commands from the command line:

$ git clone https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap.git

Cloning Bootstrap will give you a full download of all the files—not just the CSS/JavaScript, but also all of the documentation pages and the LESS files for the dynamic JavaScript elements.

If desired, using the LESS files, you can compile your own version of Bootstrap with the features or customizations that you need.

Customizing Bootstrap

You can download the source, or if you want to easily customize a few of the colors, sizing, or plugins, you can cater the Bootstrap to your needs via the Bootstrap website.

When you use the customize page (Figure 5-1), you decide what components you need. For ...