Setting up a Local Development Environment¶
Before you can contribute to Tachi, it'll help to have a functional setup on your machine.
You don't necessarily need to have a working install to contribute - you could easily make documentation contributions without having anything running on your machine - but it's extremely helpful to be able to run Tachi's things while working on them.
0. Get some developer tools.¶
If you're an experienced programmer, you won't need this bit.
Editor¶
You'll need an editor to work in!
If you've only done a bit of programming in school, you might be used to something like Visual Studio.
Sadly, Visual Studio is not a great editor for a codebase like Tachi. Visual Studio is really good at writing C# (a language we don't use at all), but its integration with TypeScript (the language we use) is quite poor.
We highly recommend that you get VSCode. Especially if you're a beginner! It's an extremely good editor, and has remarkably good integration with everything we use.
Terminal¶
You'll need a terminal to run commands in. For Linux and Mac users, you can just open a Terminal app.
However, for Windows users we recommend installing the Windows Terminal.
With a terminal open you can proceed to the next steps!
1. Getting Node and Docker.¶
You'll need node and npm in order to run Tachi. Install this from the official NodeJS website.
Info
If you are on linux, NodeJS will be provided by your package manager instead.
You may wish to use that instead. It honestly doesn't matter all too much.
Check that the install has worked by running npm -v. If you get an error message saying that npm was not found, try restarting the terminal.
To set everything else up for local development, we'll use Docker.
You should install Docker Desktop instead. Docker doesn't work well inside WSL.
sudo pacman -S docker docker-compose
brew install docker docker-compose
Info
Docker is like a VM1. It runs an entire Linux box to contain your software in, and generally sidesteps the whole "works on my machine" problem, by just shipping the entire machine.
2. Fork and pull the repo.¶
Since you can't just commit straight to someone elses codebase (that would be a massive security issue), you need to make a fork of Tachi - One owned by you!
Go to the Tachi repository and click the Fork button in the top right (Make sure you're signed in).
Now, back to the terminal:
Tip
It's good organisation to make a folder on your PC for codestuffs.
If you do that, make sure you open the terminal in that folder, so your Tachi repo will save there!
# This will create a folder called Tachi on your PC.
# It'll create it wherever your terminal is currently open in.
git clone https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/Tachi
# Open this repository in VSCode!
code Tachi
3. Authenticate with Github.¶
You'll need to authenticate with GitHub before you can actually push changes back to your repository.
There's a remarkably easy way to do this, using GitHub's gh tool.
Once you've installed it, type gh auth and follow the instructions.
You should now be properly authenticated!
4. Start Tachi!¶
With a terminal open inside the Tachi folder you just cloned, run npm start.
The frontend will be running on http://127.0.0.1:3000.
The backend will be running on https://127.0.0.1:8080.
Danger
The backend always runs on HTTPS in local development. This is because browsers tend to really hate HTTP mode nowadays, and it causes so many problems.
You need to navigate to your running instance of the backend in a browser, and tell the browser that you trust these certificates. Otherwise, all client requests to the server will silently be chomped by the browser.
5. Editor Plugins¶
If you're using VSCode as your editor (I really recommend it!) You'll want a couple plugins.
Namely, Install the ESLint plugin, and enable "Format On Save" in your settings. We use an incredibly strict plugin for ESLint, which catches a ton of programming errors and mistakes. By having it run in your editor, you can see your mistakes before you ever run the code, and have them automatically fix on save!
Tip
With Ctrl-Shift-P, you can open VSCodes "Command Palette". This will let you search
for all the possible things VSCode can do. To open the settings, you can use Ctrl-Shift-P and search for "Settings".
It's ridiculously convenient, and there's a bunch of other stuff that VSCode helps with.
8. OK, Now what.¶
Now that you've got a working version of Tachi running on your local PC, you should go check out the component-specific contribution guides!
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Docker is not actually a VM, it's significantly smarter and does some Linux jail cgroup nonsense. All you need to care about is that we're using it to spawn Linux VMs on your host system. ↩