Development setup

Frontend

The frontend is a standard Vue.JS application, you need NodeJS installed to run the development environment and build the final app.

Dependencies

I’ll be using yarn as package manager and task runner in this guide, but npm is also fine.

Inside frontend run $ yarn install to install dependencies.

Environment variables

Edit the .env.development file, most importantly update the VUE_APP_API_URL if you make changes. If you’re running the backend service in the default settings, then there is nothing to be done here.

Development server

Run $ yarn serve to start the development server on localhost:8080 with hot-reload.

Misc

Other commands are:

• yarn build to build the final app in the dist folder
• yarn lint to run the linter
• yarn test:unit to run unit tests

Backend

The backend is a standard Rails application talking to a Postgres database and an attached Redis store.

Dependencies

You need Postgres and Redis and the right Ruby version installed. Start both in the background and have your Postgres user credentials ready. If you need more help getting Postgres and Redis up and running, consider reading this guide.

For easy Ruby version installation and management I recommend rbenv but rvm or chruby are also fine.

Inside backend run $ bundle install to install dependencies.

Environment variables

Run $ cp env.sample .env to create the file .env for your local settings. It contains some placeholder values that you need to replace with your own.

Edit the DATABASE_URL and DATABASE_TEST_URL in your .env with the credentials for your local Postgres user and database and REDIS_URL with, you guessed it, the Redis url. Refer to this guide to help figuring out database user and password.

To set a SESSION_SECRET for JWT, run $ bin/rake secret and copy the output in the .env file.

In default configuration the rest can stay the same.

Development server

Finally you can start the server with $ rails s, with should start on localhost:3000.