Get started with Boosted, a Bootstrap fork — the world’s most popular framework for building responsive, mobile-first sites, with Boosted CDN and a template starter page.
Quick start
Looking to quickly add Boosted to your project? Use Boosted CDN, provided for free by the folks at StackPath. Using a package manager or need to download the source files? Head to the downloads page.
CSS
Copy-paste the stylesheet <link> into your <head> before all other stylesheets to load our CSS. You can also add orangeHelvetica and orangeIcons if needed, be careful both files are under copyright, see NOTICE.txt for more information.
JS
Many of our components require the use of JavaScript to function. Specifically, they require jQuery, Popper.js, and our own JavaScript plugins. We use jQuery’s slim build, but the full version is also supported.
Place one of the following <script>s near the end of your pages, right before the closing </body> tag, to enable them. jQuery must come first, then Popper.js, and then our JavaScript plugins.
Bundle
Include everything you need in one script with our bundle. Our boosted.bundle.js and boosted.bundle.min.js include Popper, but not jQuery. For more information about what’s included in Boosted, please see our contents section.
Separate
If you decide to go with the separate scripts solution, Popper.js must come first, and then our JavaScript plugins.
Components
Curious which components explicitly require jQuery, our JS, and Popper.js? Click the show components link below. If you’re unsure about the general page structure, keep reading for an example page template.
Show components requiring JavaScript
Alerts for dismissing
Buttons for toggling states and checkbox/radio functionality
Carousel for all slide behaviors, controls, and indicators
Collapse for toggling visibility of content
Dropdowns for displaying and positioning (also requires Popper.js)
Modals for displaying, positioning, and scroll behavior
Navbar for extending our Collapse plugin to implement responsive behavior
Toasts for displaying and dismissing
Tooltips and popovers for displaying and positioning (also requires Popper.js)
Scrollspy for scroll behavior and navigation updates
Required script
Boosted includes a focus-visible polyfill to ensure an enhanced focus visibility for keyboard users while shutting down focus styles on active state.
However, if you don’t need or want to use Boosted’s JavaScript files, you’ll still need to use focus-visible.
Starter template
Be sure to have your pages set up with the latest design and development standards. That means using an HTML5 doctype and including a viewport meta tag for proper responsive behaviors. Put it all together and your pages should look like this:
That’s all you need for overall page requirements. Visit the Layout docs or our official examples to start laying out your site’s content and components.
Important globals
Boosted employs a handful of important global styles and settings that you’ll need to be aware of when using it, all of which are almost exclusively geared towards the normalization of cross browser styles. Let’s dive in.
HTML5 doctype
Boosted requires the use of the HTML5 doctype. Without it, you’ll see some funky incomplete styling, but including it shouldn’t cause any considerable hiccups.
Responsive meta tag
Boosted is developed mobile first, a strategy in which we optimize code for mobile devices first and then scale up components as necessary using CSS media queries. To ensure proper rendering and touch zooming for all devices, add the responsive viewport meta tag to your <head>.
You can see an example of this in action in the starter template.
Box-sizing
For more straightforward sizing in CSS, we switch the global box-sizing value from content-box to border-box. This ensures padding does not affect the final computed width of an element, but it can cause problems with some third party software like Google Maps and Google Custom Search Engine.
On the rare occasion you need to override it, use something like the following:
With the above snippet, nested elements—including generated content via ::before and ::after—will all inherit the specified box-sizing for that .selector-for-some-widget.
For improved cross-browser rendering, we use Reboot to correct inconsistencies across browsers and devices while providing slightly more opinionated resets to common HTML elements.
Ressource Hints
Ressource hints are meant to optimize browser loading strategy, by either preloading assets, prefetching DNS or preconnecting to domains — but please use them carefully and only to hint resources you’ll really be using soon.
It should be used for critical resources only.
preload fonts
preconnect to CDNs
Bootstrap Community
Stay up to date on the development of Bootstrap and reach out to the community with these helpful resources.
Chat with fellow Bootstrappers in IRC. On the irc.freenode.net server, in the ##bootstrap channel.
Implementation help may be found at Stack Overflow (tagged bootstrap-4).
Developers should use the keyword bootstrap on packages which modify or add to the functionality of Bootstrap when distributing through npm or similar delivery mechanisms for maximum discoverability.