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Update design data in a Specify repository
Update design data in a Specify repository

This article helps you understand how your design data is synchronized and updated in your Specify repositories.

Updated over a week ago

Specify helps you synchronize design data between sources (e.g., Figma) and destinations (e.g., a GitHub repository).

Here is the current workflow you can create with Specify. Of course, more sources and destinations will be added in the future.

The following workflow shows how you can collect design tokens (here colors) from Figma and distribute them to GitHub and a local directory.

How Specify updates your design data between your Sources and your Destinations

For now, Specify only synchronizes your design tokens and assets from Figma to a GitHub repository or a local directory.

The synchronization flow is:

  1. You update your design data in Figma (we advise you to use Figma libraries) and publish your Figma library

  2. Specify detects the update and updates your Specify repositories collected design data from your freshly updated Figma library

  3. Specify distributes your updated design data and generates a Pull Request in your GitHub repositories set as Destinations to your Specify repositories. You can also use the Specify CLI to pull design tokens and assets in your projects.

Automatic synchronization between Sources and Specify

Your repositories in Specify are automatically synchronized with your sources every 24h at the same hour of the creation of your repository.

👉 If you created a repository at 5pm, it will be synchronized every day at 5pm.

ℹ️ Figma's webhooks are still in beta and not stable enough for us to use them to automatically synchronize your repositories in Specify.

Automatic synchronization between Specify and Destinations

When you update your Specify config file (.specifyrc.json) in your GitHub repository, Specify will automatically generate a new Pull Request if necessary.

For instance, if you update your config file to add another type of design data (e.g., vector) in your project, Specify will create a Pull Request containing your vectors coming from Specify.

ℹ️ Please make sure you're on the main branch when updating your Specify config file (.specifyrc.json). Otherwise, Specify won't detect the change.

Manual synchronization

You can also manually synchronize a Specify repository with its sources and destinations.


Within the app
Either by manually syncing your Specify repository in the app:

With the Specify CLI

Or by manually syncing your Specify repository with the CLI with the command specify sync.

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