For context, Im used to working in MVC with .net core for webdev, which has everything all nicely contained within VS for better or worse. I believe Lemmy uses react.js and rust from a cursory glance, but im not quite sure what exactly is best. Im also curious what db software it would use

Im also curious on how a testing environment would work for this. I imagine youd have to host your own instance to test any changes to have access to data, but theres a lot here that honestly I dont know much about.

Is there any posts or documentation anywhere that would be a good guide to getting started on this sort of thing? I doubt development is going to be as seamless as developing in Visual Studio where everything is all from the same company, but Id imagine that there are particular ides that work better with the types of tools that manage this

  • Howdy! I am also starting to dip my toes into Lemmy/fediverse dev (I’m toying with making an iOS client). My background is more webdev (specifically NodeJS and React).

    I think dipping into the README’s for the project would be useful. Really depends on what you want to hack on.

    If you’re more interested in the backend (Rust) side of things, you can check out the repo here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

    If you’d like to get your feet wet with the frontend (like you said it’s mainly a TypeScript/ReactJS app), that’s over here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui

    You can run both the frontend and backend locally via a docker container, and test your changes there.

    Would love to find a good place to chat about Lemmy dev - having never worked on a decentralized app I have a ton of questions!

  • See that’s the thing, there is no real “best IDE to use” for most projects outside the windows/.net ecosystem. You get your pick with the caveat that you need to configure your IDE for the particular workflow and languages/tools you’ll be working with.

    Visual Studio Code, Neovim, Emacs, Jetbrains products, etc. are all fine choices depending on your personal preferences.

    Looking at the documentation, it looks like PostgreSQL is the db server of choice.

    Also note that the documentation there has sections on installing using Docker, Ansible, and seeing up an AWS instance as well as setting one up from scratch.