Extensive Guide to Running Tartan Vote

Prerequisites

This project uses devenv to provide Cargo, Deno, Node, PostgreSQL, and all other development dependencies. Follow the devenv installation instructions.

Starting up

Now, we will get your own instance of Tartan Vote running!

Setup

You will need git.

Clone the repository from Codeberg:

git clone https://codeberg.org/ScottyLabs/tartan-vote.git
cd tartan-vote

Run direnv allow (or devenv shell) to enter the development environment. This exposes Cargo, Deno, Node, PostgreSQL, and other tooling.

Secrets

Configuration is provided automatically inside devenv shell — you do not need to create a .env. Secrets are pulled from OpenBao via secretspec, so authenticate once:

export BAO_ADDR=https://secrets2.scottylabs.org
bao login -method=oidc

If devenv shell reports missing secrets or you get 403 permission denied, see secrets-and-config.md, which documents the full secrets model and troubleshooting.

Run everything

From the repo root, inside the devenv shell:

# 1. Start the managed services (Postgres, OAuth relay)
devenv up

# 2. In another terminal: build the frontend into frontend/dist
cd frontend && deno task build && cd ..

# 3. Run the backend; it serves the API and the built frontend on :8080
cargo run

Then open http://localhost:8080.

When working on the frontend, run deno task build:watch in a separate terminal instead of the one-off build; it rebuilds frontend/dist on save, and a browser refresh picks up the changes.