puter/doc/contributors/index.md

Contributing to Puter

Essential / General Knowledge

Repository Dichotomy

• Puter's GUI is at the root; /src is the GUI
• Puter's backend is a workspace npm package; it resides in packages/backend(/src)

The above may seem counter-intuitive; backend and frontend are siblings, right? Consider this: by a different intuition, the backend is at a "deeper" level of function; this directory structure better adheres to soon-to-be contributors sifting around through the files to discover "what's what".

The directory volatile exists for your convenience to simplify running Puter for development. When Puter is run run with the backend with this repository as its working directory, it will use volatile/config and volatile/runtime instead of /etc/puter and /var/puter.

See Next

• Backend Documentation