brick.camp

A visual dictionary of LEGO building techniques. Contains a few hundred entries, each showing a technique with the parts it takes, the features it has, the space it occupies, and links to one or more sources.

It's a Hugo static site with no backend. Searching is done entirely in the browser, against CSV lookup files generated at build time.

Local setup

Requires Hugo extended (how to install).
We currently use version 0.164.0 to publish our main branch via GitHub Pages, see .github/workflows/hugo.yaml.

npm install            # for installing all dependencies
hugo server            # runs a dev server at http://localhost:1313
hugo server -D         # … includes entries marked with `draft = true`
hugo --gc --minify     # production build into public/
npm test               # runs the homepage JS tests (see tests/)

npm test needs no browser and no build. One file, tests/build.test.js, additionally runs the same modules against whatever is in public/ and skips itself when there is nothing there — so build first if you want that check.

Copy .env.example to .env and fill in the values — it's gitignored, so your keys won't be committed. Otherwise, the scripts in the next section won't work properly. For modelling and rendering, the scripts will try to call LeoCAD and LDView. So these should be installed.

Adding content

Run the following command to add content. It guides you through the options of the following sub-sections.

npm run new

Entry

Creating a new entry happens in stages:

Stage	Does
scaffold	Creates index.md and a header-only model.ldr in a new entry folder; based on archetypes/entries.md
model	Opens the model stub in LeoCAD and standardizes the header on every later pass
render	Runs LDView with an image pipeline to generate the image.png. The render = { lat, lon, fov } in index.md is the viewing angle and the field of view — a narrow fov flattens the perspective, a wide one exaggerates it.
parts	Reads the parts from the model, resolves aliases and offers the id list to correct mistakes
sources	Appends a linkbox per given source URL
verify	Builds with drafts, drops draft = true, builds for real, then opens the entry in a browser to look at
commit	Commits the entry folder and any part pages it needed

You can resume the process because this might take some time (especially the modelling).

npm run entry                # continue on the newest entry, with the first unfinished stage
npm run entry 142            # continue a particular entry (by id)
npm run entry 142 render     # run/re-run a specific stage on a particular entry
npm run entry render         # …the same stage, but on the newest entry

The id is the folder name of the entry, without leading zeros. Folders under content/entries/ are bucketed by the hundred to avoid overly long directory lists.

An entry always gets two URLs: /e/[id] and /entry/[your-human-readable-slug]/. The size and tags (including partcount-) always need to be done manually. Tags are always shaped like base-type-value (angle-studturn-28, shape-polygon-6); malformed ones fail the build and tell you which tag was wrong.

Hint: Changing LDView's preferences won't change a render. The settings are taken from ldview.conf. It's like a normal LDView setting file, but without volatile or install-specific keys like: ExtraSearchDirs\*, RecentFiles\*, Last*, Window*, Toolbar, UnofficialPartChecks\*, PovExporter\* and LDrawDir.

Link / Link image

Links append a linkbox shortcode to the entry's index.md and save the 150×150 preview image next to it as link_[xx].jpg.

Metadata comes from Peekalink, falling back to Microlink and then the page's meta tags. Flickr has a custom logic, as it is often referenced in this project.

Review the result — anything the sources didn't know is left as an empty attribute. A link image is the preview-image treatment on its own, in case the image is missing or needs to be swapped.

Parts

Parts get content/parts/[partnumber]/_index.md from the Rebrickable API, with the part image downloaded next to it. Adding new parts needs a Rebrickable API key in .env.

License

The repository splits three ways:

• Code — templates, JavaScript, stylesheets and icons — is MIT.
• Content — entry texts, LDraw models, the renders built from them and the entry metadata — is CC BY 4.0. Credit it as brick.camp — CC BY 4.0 — https://brick.camp/.
• Everything else is third-party material under its own terms: the bundled libraries, the Rebrickable part images, the thumbnail beside each source link and the LEGO® building-instruction crops in the font entry. THIRD-PARTY.md lists what and whose — worth a look before reusing any image, since some of it sits inside content/entries/.

Notes for AI agents

Architecture notes live in AGENTS.md, which deliberately covers only what no single file can explain on its own. Everything else is documented in the partial or module it belongs to.