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Paddock Paddock

Contributing

Thanks for hacking on Paddock. This is a short operational guide — how to get the stack running, the conventions we follow, and the environment gotchas that will otherwise cost you an afternoon. For deeper material, follow the links rather than re-reading it here:

  • DEV.md — running the full stack locally (production-like and hot-reload modes), voice dictation setup.
  • docs/CONFIGURATION.md — every PADDOCK_* env var with its default.
  • docs/API.md — the REST + WebSocket contract.
  • docs/TESTING.md — the test strategy and layers.
  • RELEASING.md — the changesets + release pipeline.
  • AUTH.md — authentication modes and secret handling.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”
  • Node 22+, and the claude CLI on your PATH (claude --version) for the post-turn sweeper and for any turn resolved to driveMode: batch. Chats resolve the SDK’s own bundled binary and never consult PATH, so they run without it — and so do triggers, which resolve their drive mode exactly like a chat (project override, else the instance default, which is session). Only the sweeper goes through the CLI unconditionally. If you are reading the source, note that several comments still claim all triggers are CLI turns — they are wrong, and tracked as #771.
  • A Claude Max OAuth token (CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN) or an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in your environment. Never print or commit it — load it into the environment, don’t hardcode it (see DEV.md).

Getting started

Section titled “Getting started”
Terminal window
npm install                 # install all workspaces
npm run build               # build server (tsc) + web (vite)
npm run dev                 # server on :7233 (API + WS)      — terminal 1
npm run dev:web             # Vite dev server, proxies to :7233 — terminal 2

See DEV.md for the two run modes and their tradeoffs.

Tests & checks

Section titled “Tests & checks”

Run these before opening a PR — CI runs the same set:

Terminal window
npm run check:nul           # guard: no raw NUL bytes in JS/TS sources
npm run typecheck           # tsc on both packages
npm test                    # server (unit + integration) + web (component)
npm run test:e2e            # Playwright journeys against the real server + a fake `claude`
  • npm run check:nul runs before npm ci in CI — it needs no dependencies, and a raw 0x00 in a source file is invisible in a diff while making grep/ripgrep skip the whole file as binary, so nothing later in the run would catch it.
  • If you touched website/ or openapi-site/, CI also builds the docs site (cd website && npm install && npm run build). That job is path-filtered, so it only runs when those directories change — but it is the only thing that catches an unresolvable sidebar slug or a broken relative image path.
  • npm run test:server / npm run test:web run one side only.
  • npm run test:e2e drives the real server, FleetManager, and CLI runtime; only the LLM is swapped for a fake claude on PATH (zero Anthropic calls). Opt into a real-Claude run with npm run test:e2e:live.
  • More on the test layers: docs/TESTING.md.

Environment gotchas

Section titled “Environment gotchas”

These bite everyone at least once:

  • NODE_ENV=production prunes dev dependencies. If your shell exports NODE_ENV=production (some servers/CI images do), a plain npm install silently drops tsc, vitest, Playwright, etc., and you’ll see “command not found” for the tools above. Install dev tooling explicitly:

    Terminal window
    NODE_ENV=development npm install --include=dev

  • Run tests/builds with NODE_ENV unset. NODE_ENV=production also breaks React act() in the web component tests. Unset it for the run:

    Terminal window
    env -u NODE_ENV npm run typecheck
    env -u NODE_ENV npm test
    env -u NODE_ENV npm run build

  • Use a throwaway data dir so local runs don’t touch real projects: export PADDOCK_DATA_DIR="$(mktemp -d /tmp/paddock-dev.XXXXXX)".

Branch, commit & PR conventions

Section titled “Branch, commit & PR conventions”
  • Branch for every non-trivial change — never commit to main directly, and never force-push a shared branch.
  • Commits follow Conventional Commits: type(scope): summary, e.g. feat(web): fork button, fix(server): drain queue on stop, docs(config): env-var reference. Common types: feat, fix, docs, refactor, test, chore, ci.
  • Open a PR against main. Keep PRs small and focused; describe what changed and how you verified it. CI (NUL guard + typecheck + tests + E2E, plus the docs-site build when website/ changes) must be green.

Changesets (release notes)

Section titled “Changesets (release notes)”

Paddock uses changesets for versioning and changelogs. When your PR makes a user-facing change, add a changeset in the same PR:

Terminal window
npm run changeset           # pick patch/minor/major + write a one-line summary
git add .changeset && git commit -m "chore: add changeset"

No changeset is needed for pure-internal changes (tests, CI, refactors with no observable effect, or docs-only changes to root/docs/ files that don’t ship in a package). The full release flow — how the “chore: version packages” PR cuts a Docker image and a tarball, and publishes @edspencer/paddock to npm via OIDC trusted publishing (with a provenance attestation the workflow then verifies) — is in RELEASING.md. That npm package is what every npx @edspencer/paddock install path on this site resolves to.