Lantern is a web-based project aiming to create a flexible, open source alternative to online virtual tabletops such as Roll20 and D&D Beyond. It is currently in early development.
This project requires a NodeJS v20+ environment, a PostgreSQL database server, and the PNPM package manager.
If you have NVM installed, it will automatically pick the correct Node version due to the .nvmrc file in the project root.
PNPM will automatically be installed on most machines on first use via Node's corepack. Run corepack enable at least once to enable it. See exceptions.
Clone the project from the remote. Next, from the root of the project, run pnpm install to install all dependencies.
Start your database either with a standalone PostgreSQL server or using Docker with the command docker compose up -d.
If you are using a standalone Postgres server, you will need make sure your Host, DB Name, DB User, and Password all match between your server and the environment variables defined in env.development.
If this is your first time running in development mode, run pnpm run migrate to run initial database migrations. From there, running pnpm run dev will start the project.
The project can be built with pnpm run build (as long as all dependencies are installed). Run the build with pnpm run start. You will need a .env.production.local file to run a local production build. It's secrets can be copied from the .env.development file or be actual production secrets.
The project can be end-to-end tested with pnpm run test:e2e (database needs to be running and migrated), unit tested with pnpm run test:e2e, or tested with a full suite using pnpm run test. You can type check all typescript files without running a full build with pnpm run typecheck.
Your first end-to-end test run requires pnpm exec playwright install to be run first to install dependencies (headless web browsers).
Additional markdown project documentation for this project is available in /docs. The project documentation is in the Johnny Decimal System.
While you can install Node manually on NixOS through your nix configuration or home-manager, corepack will not work and PNPM will also need to be installed that way manually. An alternative and better solution is to use the command nix-shell from root to spin up a local Node development environment temporarily that comes with the right version of Node and PNPM.