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Development setup

All commands run from the repository root. The repository pins pnpm@11.5.0; if pnpm is not installed globally, replace the leading pnpm with npm exec --yes pnpm@11.5.0 --.

First run

Section titled “First run”
Terminal window
pnpm install
test -f .env || cp .env.example .env    # then edit as needed
pnpm docker:up                          # starts PostgreSQL (pgvector)
pnpm db:generate                        # generate Prisma client
pnpm db:migrate                         # run migrations
pnpm build
pnpm --filter mcp-server dev            # MCP server on http://localhost:3000

This is the standard profile flow (the default). For the single-user lite profile and the full walkthrough, see Installation.

Quality checks

Section titled “Quality checks”

Run these before opening a pull request:

Terminal window
pnpm build
pnpm lint
pnpm typecheck
pnpm test
pnpm docs:check

Working on a single package

Section titled “Working on a single package”

Turborepo lets you filter any script to one workspace:

Terminal window
pnpm --filter @engram/memory-ltm test
pnpm --filter mcp-server test:e2e:docker
pnpm --filter @engram/vector-store test   # set PGVECTOR_TEST_URL for pgvector integration tests
pnpm --filter docs dev                    # docs site on http://localhost:3001

pgvector integration tests and the pgvector backend require the pgvector/pgvector:pg16+ Docker image; plain postgres:*-alpine images lack the extension.

Framework CLIs

Section titled “Framework CLIs”

Use project and framework generators when they exist instead of hand-creating files:

Task Command
Generate NestJS resource nest g resource <name>
Generate NestJS module nest g module <name>
Generate NestJS service nest g service <name>
Generate NestJS controller nest g controller <name>
Generate Prisma client pnpm db:generate
Create Prisma migration pnpm db:migrate
Open Prisma Studio pnpm db:studio

Manual file creation is fine for documentation, Zod schemas, custom types, small utilities, and configuration files when no generator exists.

Evaluation and benchmarks

Section titled “Evaluation and benchmarks”
Terminal window
pnpm eval             # recall quality harness (precision@k, recall@k, MRR, nDCG@k)
pnpm bench:backends   # vector-backend latency benchmark

Documentation rules

Section titled “Documentation rules”
  • Keep setup instructions short and copy-pasteable.
  • Put detailed explanations in focused docs and link to them from the root README.
  • pnpm docs:check validates frontmatter and relative links on every .md file in the repo; the docs site build additionally validates internal links in .mdx content.