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Developer Guide
Build prerequisites

Build Prerequisites

This guide is written specially those who have never installed any of the build pre-requisites before, and need to go through the tussle of the first-time setup.

Mac OS

The Mac OS guide is targeted at a fresh Mac installation. Note that this particular guide is an opinionated route of getting things installed. To our knowledge, it's the perfect balance between speed-running Modtree's install and putting you in a the best position for any future projects.

Overall steps needed:

  1. Install git
  2. Install homebrew
  3. Install node
  4. Install yarn
  5. Install postgresql
  6. Install docker

Install git

Open a terminal window and run git. A window should pop up prompting you to install standard xcode tools. Follow those instructions, and you will end up with git installed.

To check if you have git installed, run git. You should see the git help text.

Install homebrew

Head over to brew.sh and follow their install instructions.

Be sure to read the final output for any post-installation actions.

To check if you have brew installed, run brew. You should see the brew help text.

Install node

Instead of installing node directly, this guide will show you how to install n, a node version manager, and then node itself.

brew install n

sudo n 16 # modtree uses node v16

To check if you have node installed correctly, run node --version. Make sure the output starts with a "v16".

$ node --version
# v16.15.0

Install yarn

To install yarn using the following method, you need to have node installed first.

corepack enable

If that fails and requires elevated permissions:

sudo corepack enable

To check if you have yarn installed correctly, run yarn --version. Make sure the output starts with a "1".

$ yarn --version
# 1.22.18

Install postgresql

You can install postgresql using homebrew with:

brew install postgresql

Upon completion, postgresql is installed, but not started by default. If you try to open a connection to postgresql, it will throw an error.

To start it, run:

brew services start postgresql

To check if postgres is working, you can run:

psql postgres

It should replace your command prompt with postgresql's command prompt.

$ psql postgres
# psql (14.3)
# Type "help" for help.
#
# postgres=#

You can exit the postgresql prompt by running exit.

psql is a command that opens a connection to the database.

postgres is the name of the database you want to open.

The database you want to open needs to exist in order for the connection to be established.

You can try running psql some_cool_db. There will be an error saying that some_cool_db doesn't exist yet, rightfully so.

To solve that, you can run createdb some_cool_db first, and only then connect to it with psql some_cool_db

To delete a database, run dropdb some_cool_db.

Install docker

Follow Docker's instructions here.

Setup
Contributing