Availability Methods

COMPATIBILITY NOTE

VuePress requires Node.js >= 8.

Global Installation

If you only want to play around with VuePress, you can install it globally:

# install globally
yarn global add vuepress # OR npm install -g vuepress

# create the project folder
mkdir vuepress-starter && cd vuepress-starter

# create a markdown file
echo '# Hello VuePress' > README.md

# start writing
vuepress dev

# build
vuepress build

Inside an Existing Project

If you have an existing project and would like to keep documentation inside the project, you should install VuePress as a local dependency. This setup also allows you to use CI or services like Netlify (opens new window) for automatic deployment on push.

# install as a local dependency
yarn add -D vuepress # OR npm install -D vuepress

# create a docs directory
mkdir docs
# create a markdown file
echo '# Hello VuePress' > docs/README.md

WARNING

We currently recommend using Yarn (opens new window) instead of npm when installing VuePress into an existing project that has webpack 3.x as a dependency, because npm fails to generate the correct dependency tree in this case.

Then, add some scripts to package.json:

{
  "scripts": {
    "docs:dev": "vuepress dev docs",
    "docs:build": "vuepress build docs"
  }
}

You can now start writing with:

yarn docs:dev # OR npm run docs:dev

To generate static assets, run:

yarn docs:build # OR npm run docs:build

By default, the built files will be in .vuepress/dist, which can be configured via the dest field in .vuepress/config.js. The built files can be deployed to any static file server. See Deployment Guide for guides on deploying to popular services.