hacking on tangled#

We highly recommend installing nix (the package manager) before working on the codebase. The nix flake provides a lot of helpers to get started and most importantly, builds and dev shells are entirely deterministic.

To set up your dev environment:

nix develop

Non-nix users can look at the devShell attribute in the flake.nix file to determine necessary dependencies.

running the appview#

The nix flake also exposes a few app attributes (run nix flake show to see a full list of what the flake provides), one of the apps runs the appview with the air live-reloader:

TANGLED_DEV=true nix run .#watch-appview

# TANGLED_DB_PATH might be of interest to point to
# different sqlite DBs

# in a separate shell, you can live-reload tailwind
nix run .#watch-tailwind

running a knotserver#

An end-to-end knotserver setup requires setting up a machine with sshd, repoguard, keyfetch, a git user, which is quite cumbersome and so the nix flake provides a nixosConfiguration to do so.

To begin, head to http://localhost:3000 in the browser and generate a knotserver secret. Replace the existing secret in flake.nix with the newly generated secret.

You can now start a lightweight NixOS VM using nixos-shell like so:

QEMU_NET_OPTS="hostfwd=tcp::6000-:6000,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22" nixos-shell --flake .#knotVM

# hit Ctrl-a + c + q to exit the VM

This starts a knotserver on port 6000 with ssh exposed on port 2222. You can push repositories to this VM with this ssh config block on your main machine:

Host nixos-shell
    Hostname localhost
    Port 2222
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/my_tangled_key

Set up a remote called local-dev on a git repo:

git remote add local-dev git@nixos-shell:user/repo
git push local-dev main