Please as a first start, tell the community about your intent to develop a feature or fix a bug. Search for the associated issue if it exists or open one with steps to reproduce (for bugs) or a [user story](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story#Principle) (for features).
## Setup
### Prerequisites
To setup your environment, you would need to install the following dependencies:
- git
- [nvm](https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm/blob/master/README.md) (recommended) or nodejs installed on your system
- Chromium to run the end-to-end tests
- Python (preferably Python 3.9) and virtualenv
- :warning: As of 2023-06-06, Python 3.11 is not supported due to the version of the [wrapt dependency](https://github.com/GrahamDumpleton/wrapt/issues/196)
You need to install the supported nodejs version as well as yarn. To do so, in the grist-core root directory, run the following command to install nodejs via nvm:
```bash
$ nvm install
```
Now check that node is installed in the version specified in the `.nvmrc` file:
```bash
$ node --version
```
Then install yarn (the `-g` flag here means that yarn will be available globally):
```bash
$ npm install -g yarn
```
Now each time you want to load nodejs and yarn in your environment, just run the following command at grist-core root directory:
```bash
$ nvm use
```
#### Using nodejs
You can also use nodejs installed in your system. To prevent incompatibilities, ensure that the `node --version` command reports a version equal or greater to the one in `.nvmrc`.
### Install the python packages
Be sure to have Python and virtualenv installed. On debian-based Linux distributions, you can simply run the following command as root:
```bash
# apt install python3.9 python3.9-venv
```
### Install the project dependencies and build
First install the nodejs dependencies:
```bash
$ yarn install
```
Then prepare the virtual environment with all the python dependencies:
```bash
$ yarn install:python
```
Finally run this to do an initial build:
```bash
$ yarn run build:prod
```
## Start the server in development mode
Just run the following command:
```bash
$ yarn start
```
Each time you change something, just reload the webpage in your browser.
Happy coding!
### Pick an issue
Lost on what you can do to help? If you are new to Grist, you may just pick one of the issues labelled `good first issue`:
You can debug the NodeJS application using this command:
```bash
$ yarn start:debug
```
And start using your nodejs debugger client (like the Chrome Devtools). See https://nodejs.org/en/docs/guides/debugging-getting-started#inspector-clients
