Development Workflow

Everything is driven by a self-documenting Makefile — run make (or make help) to list every target. The full local guide is in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Prerequisites

• macOS — Sillview is macOS-first and the makers produce macOS artifacts.
• Node.js 22+ — CI runs on Node 22. The lockfile (package-lock.json) is committed.
• GitHub CLI (gh) — used by make kasas to download the backend binary.
• Optional: Go 1.25 + a checkout of ../kasas — only if you want to build the backend from source (make sync-kasas) instead of downloading a prebuilt binary.

Common targets

Command	What it does
make install	Install npm dependencies
make dev	Run against a real (bundled/managed) kasas backend
make mock	Run on offline fixtures — no backend, no real data
make kasas	Download the prebuilt kasas binary into resources/bin
make sync-kasas	Build the kasas binary from ../kasas source
make lint / make lint-fix	Run ESLint (optionally with --fix)
make typecheck	Type-check with tsc --noEmit
make test	Lint + typecheck — the same gate CI enforces
make review	Run test, then summarize the diff vs origin/main
make package	Build the unpackaged .app into out/
make dist / make build	Build the .dmg + .zip into out/make/
make clean / make clean-all	Remove build output (and deps/binary)

make auto-installs dependencies when they're missing or stale, and fetches the kasas binary only if resources/bin/kasas is absent — so you can jump straight to make mock or make dist on a fresh checkout.

The quality gate

make test runs ESLint + tsc --noEmit — exactly what CI enforces on every push and PR. Run it before you push.

make test

For a quick pre-PR pass, make review runs test and prints a diffstat against origin/main.

Two ways to run

• make mock — KASAS_MOCK=1, the whole UI on in-memory fixtures. Best for widget and layout work. See Offline Mock Mode.
• make dev — the real, managed backend: Sillview spawns and supervises kasas, generates its config, and connects. Needs resources/bin/kasas (via make kasas or make sync-kasas).

Toolchain notes

A few non-obvious choices worth knowing before you touch the build:

• Tailwind v4 (CSS-first, @tailwindcss/vite) — there is no tailwind.config.js.
• Tremor is used in its copy-paste/Recharts form, not the frozen @tremor/react package (which needs Tailwind v3 and renders nothing under v4). Components in components/tremor/ follow Tremor's API.
• vite.renderer.config.mts must be .mts. Forge loads Vite configs as CommonJS, but @tailwindcss/vite and @vitejs/plugin-react are ESM-only.

Conventions

• The renderer never touches the network directly — all kasas traffic goes through the main-process broker. See kasas Integration.
• Money is always a decimal string, never a number.
• Commits follow Conventional Commits, and releases are automated — see Releases & CI.