ZIm/docs/backend-development.md

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Developing Zed's Backend

Zed's backend consists of the following components:

• The Zed.dev web site
  • implemented in the zed.dev repository
  • hosted on Vercel.
• The Zed Collaboration server
  • implemented in the crates/collab directory of the main zed repository
  • hosted on DigitalOcean, using Kubernetes
• The Zed Postgres database
  • defined via migrations in the crates/collab/migrations directory
  • hosted on DigitalOcean

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Local Development

Here's some things you need to develop backend code locally.

Dependencies

• Postgres - download Postgres.app.

Setup

1. Check out the zed and zed.dev repositories into a common parent directory

2. Set the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable to one of your GitHub personal access tokens (PATs).

   • You can create a PAT here.

   • You may want to add something like this to your ~/.zshrc:

     export GITHUB_TOKEN=<the personal access token>
     

3. In the zed.dev directory, run npm install to install dependencies.

4. In the zed directory, run script/bootstrap to set up the database

5. In the zed directory, run foreman start to start both servers

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Production Debugging

Datadog

Zed uses Datadog to collect metrics and logs from backend services. The Zed organization lives within Datadog's US5 site, so it can be accessed at us5.datadoghq.com. Useful things to look at in Datadog:

• The Logs page shows logs from Zed.dev and the Collab server, and the internals of Zed's Kubernetes cluster.
• The collab metrics dashboard shows metrics about the running collab server