README

Generate a browsable Markdown pattern library — with screenshots — from a WordPress site's registered block patterns.

A block theme of any size is going to end up with dozens or hundreds of patterns. That is a design system, and it has the design system problem: the names live in patterns/*.php, the appearance lives in the block inserter behind a login, and neither is somewhere you can point at.

This plugin generates the missing artifact. The site serves a manifest of its registered patterns and renders each one in isolation; a Node CLI captures them with Playwright and writes an index plus one page per category. The result is Markdown and images you commit — so it renders on GitHub, it is searchable, and when a pattern's appearance changes, the changed screenshot shows up in review.

It works against your local environment or a live site. A GitHub Action can run the whole thing and open a pull request with the refreshed docs.

Install

Three separate packages ship from this repository, all from the same tag:

	Name	How you use it
WordPress plugin	`humanmade/wp-pattern-library`	`composer require humanmade/wp-pattern-library`
CLI	`@humanmade/wp-pattern-library`	`npm install -D @humanmade/wp-pattern-library`
GitHub Action	`humanmade/wp-pattern-library`	`uses: humanmade/wp-pattern-library@v0.4.2`

The plugin belongs on the site you capture from. The CLI runs wherever you generate the library — your machine, or CI — so the site itself never needs Node. The action is a thin wrapper around the CLI for running the whole thing in a workflow; pin it to a released tag, as there is deliberately no moving @v1 tag while the package is pre-1.0.

Quick start

# 1. On the site you want to capture from.
composer require humanmade/wp-pattern-library
wp plugin activate wp-pattern-library

// 2. Limit it to your own patterns, so core's stay out of the library.
add_filter( 'pattern_library_namespaces', fn () => [ 'my-theme/' ] );

# 3. Create an account for the generator. Prints an application password once.
wp pattern-library setup --login=pattern-library-bot

// 4. pattern-library.config.js, in your project root.
export default {
	title: 'My Theme Pattern Library',
	namespaces: [ 'my-theme/' ],
	outputDir: 'docs/pattern-library',
};

# 5. Credentials come from the environment, never the config file.
export PATTERN_LIBRARY_SITE="http://localhost:8888"
export PATTERN_LIBRARY_WP_USER="pattern-library-bot"
export PATTERN_LIBRARY_WP_APP_PASSWORD="xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx"

npx @humanmade/wp-pattern-library build --dry-run   # Look first.
npx @humanmade/wp-pattern-library build             # Then capture.

Full walkthrough, including the things that catch people out: Getting started.

Commands

pattern-library build            # Capture screenshots, then write Markdown.
pattern-library build --dry-run  # Report what would be included; write nothing.
pattern-library capture hero     # Screenshots only, for patterns matching "hero".
pattern-library generate         # Markdown only, from existing screenshots.
pattern-library manifest         # Print the filtered manifest as JSON.

Screenshots are written only when their bytes change, so re-running does not churn images whose content merely shifted underneath them. The run summary flags patterns that rendered empty, failed outright, or referenced resources that no longer load.

What you get

docs/pattern-library/
├── README.md          Index: every category, with counts
├── banner.md          One page per pattern category
├── testimonials.md
└── screenshots/

Each pattern gets its screenshot, description, categories, keywords, block and post types, and the viewport it was captured at.

Beyond the basics, the generator can capture section variants (the same pattern on a second ground), give query-loop item templates a post to bind to, settle scroll-triggered animations before capturing, and group categories into a multi-level taxonomy.

Requirements

WordPress 6.1+ · PHP 8.1+ · Node 24+

Documentation


About	What it does, and what it deliberately does not.
Getting started	Install and first capture, against a local site.
WordPress plugin	What it adds to a site, access control, endpoints, filters.
NPM package	Every config option, CLI commands, output.
GitHub Action	Running it in CI against a live site.

Design decisions are recorded as ADRs in docs/architecture/.

Contributing

Bug reports, ideas and pull requests are all welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the development setup — npm run env:start gives you a WordPress with sixty patterns to capture against — and docs/roadmap.md for things that have been thought about but not built.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later

humanmade / wp-pattern-library

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