#Building from Source

If you'd like to contribute code to Renda Studio or its engine, you'll likely want to try out the changes locally before submitting a PR. Fortunately, Renda does not need a build step in order to run! So in theory checking out the code and starting a server should be enough.

#Running Studio Locally

In practice though, Renda Studio still has a few dependencies that need to be downloaded. You can follow these steps to get started:

Run git checkout https://github.com/rendajs/Renda.git to check out Renda's main
cd into the cloned repository with cd Renda
Install Deno.

Note: Sometimes newer versions of Deno tend to break some of our tools. If something seems off, you can try to upgrade to the last version that is known to work with Renda. To find out which version that is, note the DENO_VERSION environment variable inside ci.yml. repository.

Run deno task dev to install dependencies and spin up a development server.

If this is your first time running this command, it will download some required dependencies, this generally shouldn't take too long. Once that's done, it starts a local server http://localhost:8080, Renda Studio can be found at http://localhost:8080/studio/.

Other than starting up a basic HTTP server, this task also comes with some useful utilities. For example, it hosts a WebSocket that allows you to modify built-in assets right from Studio. This way you can modify built-in shaders outside of your browser and directly see updates, all without the need to reload the page.

Once the server has started, this command will start downloading and generating some files in the background that allows you to get type checking and autocompletions in your editor. This even works for files using the Deno api, no Deno extension required!

#Actually Building From Source for Real Now

Ok, but let's be honest, making all these requests to the separate source files every time you open Renda Studio is not very efficient. That's why the version hosted on renda.studio has bundled all the JavaScript and CSS files.

If you wish to build Studio for personal use, or just to try out your changes, you can run deno task build-studio. This will place all the files in studio/dist/. You can view the built version by going to http://localhost:8080/studio/dist/ in your browser. Similarly, you can run deno task build-engine to build only the engine.

But if you like to contribute code, none of this is even necessary! Every PR automatically builds the code for you and deploys it to https://pr-${PR_ID}.renda.studio. And since you can make changes and try them out locally without building, it's unlikely that you'll ever need to run these build tasks.