🌎 Firefish Developer Docs

Nix Dev Environment

The Firefish repo comes with a Nix-based shell environment to help make development as easy as possible!

Please note, however, that this environment will not work on Windows outside of a WSL2 environment.

Prerequisites

Installed the Nix Package Manager (use the comman on their website)
Installed direnv and added its hook to your shell. (package manager)

Once the repo is cloned to your computer, follow these next few steps inside the Firefish folder:

Run direnv allow. This will build the environment and install all needed tools.
Run install-deps, then prepare-config, to install the node dependencies and prepare the needed config files.
In a second terminal, run devenv up. This will spawn a Redis server, a Postgres server, and the Firefish server in dev mode.
Once you see the Firefish banner printed in your second terminal, run migrate in the first.
Once migrations finish, open http://localhost:3000 in your web browser.
You should now see the admin user creation screen!

Note: When you want to restart a dev server, all you need to do is run devenv up, no other steps are necessary.

Possible Troubles with the dev enviroment

(this doesn't have to be done under normal conditions, this is for future reference)

direnv

If you have any trouble with direnv allow Check that the contents of .envrc have the same version of nix-direnv that is specified here:

nix-direnv under -> installation -> using direnv source url https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv#direnv-source_url

there should be no errors during direnv allow

outdated nix packages

if install-deps or any subsequent command doesn't run due to versioning problems flake.nix and flake.lock may be outdated

delete flake.lock, or better, run nix flake update --extra-experimental-features flakes --extra-experimental-features nix-command after that, run direnv rebuild

if there are any errors, you might have to change flake.nix (because the available options can change between versions - consider getting support in the matrix channel)

after changing a node version

in my case, i had to change the node version from 19, to 18

! before proceeding, make sure to delete all build artifacts! remove node_modules and built folders, and maybe .devenv and .direnv as well manually, or run npm cache clean --force and pnpm cleanall

Windows Subsystem for Linux

if devenv up terminates because of wrong folder permissions,

create the file /etc/wsl.conf in your distro and add

[automount]
options = "metadata"

this allows chmod calls to actually have an effect. the build scripts DO actually set the permissions, it just needs to work in wsl.

devenv up

devenv up may take a looong time. (some say this is fake news, maybe it was bad luck in my case)

do not get spooked by this error:

> firefish@14.0.0-dev32 start /mnt/.../firefish
> pnpm --filter backend run start


> backend@ start /mnt/.../firefish/packages/backend
> pnpm node ./built/index.js

node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1078
  throw err;
  ^

Error: Cannot find module '/mnt/.../firefish/packages/backend/built/index.js'
    at Module._resolveFilename (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1075:15)
    at Module._load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:920:27)
    at Function.executeUserEntryPoint [as runMain] (node:internal/modules/run_main:81:12)
    at node:internal/main/run_main_module:23:47 {
  code: 'MODULE_NOT_FOUND',
  requireStack: []
}

Node.js v18.16.0
undefined
/mnt/.../firefish/packages/backend:
 ERR_PNPM_RECURSIVE_RUN_FIRST_FAIL  backend@ start: `pnpm node ./built/index.js`
Exit status 1
 ELIFECYCLE  Command failed with exit code 1.

the script is designed to constantly try to start the server, while the build is still running. this just means that the build isn't finished yet.

at some point you should see a banner that says "Firefish" in big letters - then you're good to go and can run migrate (in another terminal)!

if you don't see the banner, and it's for some reason stuck on Finished 'build' after 917 ms for a view minutes,

just leave devenv running and open another terminal in the folder run migrate and then pnpm --filter backend run start by yourself the server should start

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