CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Developing

Run CLI in Example Project

This is useful for manually testing if commands work.

cd examples/basic
cargo run --bin rivet -- <COMMAND>

To run without rebuilding:

cd examples/basic
../../target/debug/rivet <COMMAND>

Install CLI Globally

To install the

cargo install --path packages/cli --debug

Edit Backend Without Rebuilding Rust Toolchain

To iterate faster on the backend without requiring rebuilding the toolchain for every change, run rivet config edit user and add this to your config, where /path/to/toolchain is the path to this repository:

{
  "backend": {
    "source_path": "/path/to/toolchain/packages/backend/"
  }
}

This will direct the toolchain to use the raw source code for the backend instead of the embedded backend source code that requires a rebuild.

Backend Helper Deno Tasks

See packages/backend/deno.jsonc for extra scripts for the backend.

Implementation Notes

Backend Package

The backend package is a TypeScript package located at packages/backend/. This contains:

• packages/backend/toolchain/ – Library to manage the backend in development
• packages/backend/cli/ – JSON CLI interface to the toolchain
• packages/backend/runtime/ – Runtime code used to by the backend at runtime

Embedding Deno

Deno is automatically downloaded and installed to a temporary path in packages/deno-embed. This is used both at runtime for the toolchain and any build scripts that depend on Deno.

Embedding Backend

The backend is embedded using include_dir. This is automatically inflated to the data dir at runtime. The backend path can be overridden using the backend.source_path setting.

Task Architecture

Tasks are structured in a way where the applciation can make a request and receive a stream of events in response until the task completes.

This allows for a simpler architecture by:

• Allowing CLI commands to map nicely to tasks
• Allow a clean callback format for FFIs