HTML5 Boilerplate homepage | Documentation table of contents

Usage

Once you have cloned or downloaded HTML5 Boilerplate, creating a site or app usually involves the following:

  1. Set up the basic structure of the site.
  2. Add some content, style, and functionality.
  3. Run your site locally to see how it looks.
  4. (Optionally run a build script to automate the optimization of your site - e.g. ant build script)
  5. Deploy your site.

Basic structure

A basic HTML5 Boilerplate site initially looks something like this:

.
├── css
│   ├── main.css
│   └── normalize.css
├── doc
├── img
├── js
│   ├── main.js
│   ├── plugins.js
│   └── vendor
│       ├── jquery.min.js
│       └── modernizr.min.js
├── .editorconfig
├── .htaccess
├── 404.html
├── apple-touch-icon.png
├── browserconfig.xml
├── index.html
├── humans.txt
├── robots.txt
├── crossdomain.xml
├── favicon.ico
├── tile-wide.png
└── tile.png

What follows is a general overview of each major part and how to use them.

css

This directory should contain all your project’s CSS files. It includes some initial CSS to help get you started from a solid foundation. About the CSS.

doc

This directory contains all the HTML5 Boilerplate documentation. You can use it as the location and basis for your own project’s documentation.

js

This directory should contain all your project’s JS files. Libraries, plugins, and custom code can all be included here. It includes some initial JS to help get you started. About the JavaScript.

.htaccess

The default web server configs are for Apache. For more information, please refer to the Apache Server Configs repository.

Host your site on a server other than Apache? You’re likely to find the corresponding server configs project listed in our Server Configs repository.

404.html

A helpful custom 404 to get you started.

browserconfig.xml

This file contains all settings regarding custom tiles for IE11.

For more info on this topic, please refer to MSDN.

.editorconfig

The .editorconfig file is provided in order to encourage and help you and your team to maintain consistent coding styles between different editors and IDEs. Read more about the .editorconfig file.

index.html

This is the default HTML skeleton that should form the basis of all pages on your site. If you are using a server-side templating framework, then you will need to integrate this starting HTML with your setup.

Make sure that you update the URLs for the referenced CSS and JavaScript if you modify the directory structure at all.

If you are using Google Universal Analytics, make sure that you edit the corresponding snippet at the bottom to include your analytics ID.

humans.txt

Edit this file to include the team that worked on your site/app, and the technology powering it.

robots.txt

Edit this file to include any pages you need hidden from search engines.

crossdomain.xml

A template for working with cross-domain requests. About crossdomain.xml.

Icons

Replace the default favicon.ico, tile.png, tile-wide.png and Apple Touch Icon with your own.

If you want to use different Apple Touch Icons for different resolutions please refer to the according documentation.

You might want to check out Hans’ handy HTML5 Boilerplate Favicon and Apple Touch Icon PSD-Template.