Running from Source (Development)

This guide walks you through setting up a local development environment to run and modify Jotter.

Prerequisites

Ensure you have the following installed on your machine:

Node.js (v22 or higher recommended) and npm
Go (v1.25.0 or higher)
Wails CLI (optional, required to build/run the desktop app from source):
bash
```
go install github.com/wailsapp/wails/v2/cmd/wails@latest
```
A terminal shell (Bash, Zsh, PowerShell)

bash

git clone https://github.com/simon123h/jotter.git
cd jotter

A workspace helper script is provided to install Node dependencies for both the root and frontend, and download all Go backend dependencies:

bash

npm run install:all

You can run Jotter in either Browser/Web mode or as a native Wails Desktop Application.

To run Jotter in developer desktop mode (interactive desktop window with hot-reloading support for both Go and Vue):

bash

npm run dev
# or directly
wails dev

To run both the Go REST API server and the frontend (Vue 3 / Vite) concurrently in your web browser with hot-reloading:

bash

npm run dev:backend
# and in another terminal
npm run dev:frontend

Several npm script wrappers are available at the root level for convenient development workflow:

Command	Description
`npm run dev`	Standard dev mode: launches the Wails desktop window with hot-reload.
`npm run build`	Builds both the `jotter` (server) and `jotter-desktop` binaries.
`npm run build:server`	Builds only the server binary.
`npm run build:desktop`	Builds only the desktop binary.
`npm run test`	Executes both backend (Go test) and frontend (Vitest) test suites.
`npm run lint`	Lints the entire codebase.
`npm run format`	Auto-formats code.

For individual components:

Backend commands can be run in the root directory: go test -v ./..., go vet ./..., go fmt ./..., etc.
Frontend commands can be run inside the frontend/ directory using standard npm commands: npm run dev, npm run test, npm run lint, etc.