Contributor overview

Apollon is a pnpm 11 monorepo on Node 24 LTS. Every bundled artifact is built with Vite (the standalone server runs through tsc directly). The library is published to npm; the standalone ships as Docker images; the VS Code extension is published to the Marketplace and Open VSX. One repo, four release pipelines, one bundler.

Setup

git clone git@github.com:ls1intum/Apollon.git
cd Apollon
nvm install && nvm use      # pins Node to .nvmrc (24 LTS)
pnpm install
pnpm dev

pnpm dev runs the library (build watch), server, webapp, and a local Redis container concurrently. Default ports auto-resolve; override via APOLLON_WEBAPP_PORT, APOLLON_SERVER_PORT, APOLLON_WS_PORT, APOLLON_REDIS_PORT.

What's where

• Project structure — workspace layout
• Scripts — the pnpm commands and what they do
• Diagram version history — how named versions, autosaves, and eviction work in Apollon Standalone
• Visual tests — Playwright snapshot regeneration inside the pinned Docker image
• Mobile builds — building the iOS / Android apps with Capacitor
• Troubleshooting — common local-setup and self-host issues
• Release notes — when to add a changeset and how to write it
• Release pipeline → GitHub Actions — required-status-checks setup
• Release pipeline → npm publishing — release.yml (Changesets Version Packages PR) + per-artifact release workflows

Pull-request checklist

pnpm run lint        # eslint per workspace + markdownlint
pnpm run format:check
pnpm run build       # library first, then server + webapp concurrently
pnpm test            # library unit tests

If the change is user-, embedder-, or operator-visible, also add a changeset — pnpm changeset — per the release-notes guide.

The pre-push hook also runs pnpm run lint. CI runs the full matrix on every PR, Docker builds, and the library publint + bundle-size budgets, and the advisory Verify changesets check flags a tracked-package change that ships without one. Visual regression runs per-PR too (see Visual tests) so a rendering change refreshes its own baselines; the document-growth budget is guarded per-PR on Firefox, the engine the exam-freeze was reported on.

Commit messages

Conventional commits are enforced by commitlint, which constrains both the type (type-enum) and the scope (scope-enum):

chore(library): drop dead deps
fix(server): handle gunzip Z_DATA_ERROR in autoVersion
refactor(vscode-extension)!: drop deprecated webview-ui-toolkit

Valid types: feat, fix, perf, docs, refactor, build, chore, ci, test, style, revert. Valid scopes: library, server, webapp, vscode, vscode-extension, deps, ci, docker, docs, release. (commitlint.config.mjs is the source of truth.)

Because the repo is squash-merge only, the PR title's type becomes the commit type — and that type groups the release note (the full mapping is in Release notes → How your change gets grouped). Pick it for the user-visible kind of change.