Development and Contributing

Pinchflat is written in Elixir - a functional programming language that runs on the Erlang VM. It uses the Phoenix web framework and SQLite for the database. The frontend is mostly normal server-rendered HTML with a little Alpine.js as-needed.

Elixir is a personal favourite of mine and is ideal for building fault-tolerant systems. It's also a joy to work with and has a great community. If you're interested in contributing, I'd be happy to help you get started with Elixir - just open an issue with some questions and we can chat!

Local setup

• docker compose build --no-cache
• docker compose up -d && docker attach pinchflat-phx-1
• After a few minutes the app should be accessible at localhost:4008
  • Please let me know if you run into any hiccups here - I haven't had to bootstrap the app from scratch in a long time and I might have forgotten something
• Media downloads and config will be stored in the tmp directory. Not the OS's /tmp directory, but the one in the root of the project

Running tests and linting

• Open a shell with docker compose exec phx bash
• Run mix test to run the tests
• Run mix check to do a full testing, linting, and static analysis pass

Top tips

• Look for any module that ends in *_worker.ex - these are where the interesting stuff happens and you can trace back from there to see how the app works. lib/pinchflat/slow_indexing/media_collection_indexing_worker.ex is a good place to start
• There is a database ERD that's stored at priv/repo/erd.png