Notes/docs/Developer Guide/Developer Guide/Environment Setup.md

Environment Setup

Setting up pnpm

Trilium uses the pnpm package manager in order to better manage its mono-repo structure. Unlike npm which comes by default with Node.js, pnpm needs to be manually activated.

For most systems this can be achieved via corepack:

corepack enable

After that, run pnpm in a new terminal to see if it is working. On Windows, if you get:

pnpm : The term 'pnpm' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.

The solution is to run corepack enable in a Terminal with administrative rights.

As a quick heads-up of some differences when compared to npm:

• Generally instead of npm run we have pnpm run instead.
• Instead of npx we have pnpm exec.

Installing dependencies

Run pnpm i at the top of the Notes repository to install the dependencies.

IDE

Our recommended IDE for working on TriliumNext is Visual Studio Code (or VSCodium if you are looking for a fully open-source alternative).

By default we include a number of suggested extensions which should appear when opening the repository in VS Code. Most of the extensions are for integrating various technologies we are using such as Playwright and Vitest for testing and NX for mono-repo management.