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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.

  • At minimum 16GB of free memory:

    • 500MB to run the Revolt stack
    • Between 10GB and 12GB to run Visual Studio Code (includes rust-analyzer)
    • 2GB to run Chromium (conservative estimate)
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'll 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

Setup Environment​

To get started, first install the stack CLI.

# For npm users
npm i -g revolt-stack

# For yarn users
yarn global add revolt-stack

Now create a new folder where you want to install Revolt into.

mkdir /path/to/revolt
cd /path/to/revolt

Finally, initialise everything:

revolt init
revolt env
revolt build

Working with Revolt​

You can now open a VSCode workspace at the root of the directory you just installed the project to.

To run Revolt, simply open a terminal inside of any project folder or the root directory and run:

revolt run

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