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Contribution Guide

Learn how to quickly get started with the Revolt stack and contribute to the project.

If you are not a developer, please see the How To Help section on the home page.

caution

You may be tempted to skip steps, but please go in order so you definitely do not miss anything.

1. Read before continuing​

The current contribution guidelines are here.
Please make sure to read and commit to these before starting to make any changes.

2. Consider Alternative Toolchains​

Before you continue, this guide is meant for running the full stack locally which may be quite demanding and is not applicable to most developers. You may want to:

3. System Requirements​

The Revolt stack is quite small, fragmented and easy to run which comes at the cost of a pretty demanding development environment. Below are a few recommendations if you want to get started:

  • A modern multi-core CPU for Rust compilation - Ryzens are great for this job.

  • About 30GB of free disk space to ensure everything can be installed and built.

    You may want to run cargo clean in project folders frequently if you do not have much.

  • I recommend at minimum 4GB of free memory:

    • 500MB to run the Revolt stack (production builds use significantly less memory)
    • Between 2GB and 12GB to run Visual Studio Code with rust-analyzer
    • 1GB to run a browser (conservative estimate)

In my testing, I only used 2.7gb when first running the development environment as of 2022-08-06 (before, after).

Important!

These do not apply if you're just working on Revite (the web app) and/or Revolt Desktop.

You'll probably be fine with 2GB of free memory or less.

caution

Keep in mind, the free memory recommendation is specifically about free memory, you should have more to buffer for any applications you use such as: Communications, Browser, Music Player, etc.

If you have around 24GB and especially around 16GB of memory, you should be using Linux with swap enabled or else you may find yourself running out frequently.

Ideal machines for working with the full stack have 32GB or more of memory to buffer for the stack and other apps.

4. Prerequisites​

You need to have these tools installed and ready to go.

If working with the web app, please use and test your changes on:

  • A Chromium browser (e.g. Chrome or Edge)
  • A WebKit browser (e.g. Safari or Epiphany)
  • Firefox

5. Setup Backend​

To get started, pull the backend repository:

git clone https://github.com/revoltchat/backend
cd backend

Bring up required containers:

docker-compose up -d
Working on Autumn and January

Currently Autumn and January are not part of the backend repository and must be worked on separately, no guidance is provided at this time.

Now run the two core projects:

# without mold
cargo run --bin revolt-delta
cargo run --bin revolt-bonfire

# with mold
mold -run cargo run --bin revolt-delta
mold -run cargo run --bin revolt-bonfire

6. Configure Client​

To get started, pull revite with all requirements:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/revoltchat/revite
cd revite
yarn
yarn build:deps

Create an .env.local file with the contents:

VITE_API_URL=http://local.revolt.chat:8000

Now start the app:

yarn dev --port 3001

You can now access Revite (the web client) at http://local.revolt.chat:3001.