Lerna Documentation For Development

[gwincr11]

👋 I am working on some of the npm packages to add some lazy evaluation and other features we discussed. I am running into issues with Typescript not properly finding the nbdime packaged when building the webapp and lab packages. I am also not sure of the best ways to interact with the local server when altering things locally.

It would be great to document some of the common development patters around this and would unblock us from making some improvements to nbdime. Thanks ❤️

cc @vidartf

[vidartf]

Do you have some examples of some cases/patterns? It would help me better understand what level om details would be most helpful here.

[gwincr11]

Thanks,

I think it would be helpful to have docs around:

1. Setting up the javascript environment for development
2. Compiling typescript for each package
3. Running the server locally to test changes
4. Running the tests for each package

An example would be, I want to alter the javascript for the UI, how do I install the code locally, where do I alter the code, how can I compile and test the changes.

I am also wondering if you would be open to us putting codespaces dev container into this project so people can jump into a pre-configured environment to help with some of the install?

[gwincr11]

It would also be helpful to document how to point jupyter lab at a local nbdime path.