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Ask anything about Tack.

Answers come from these docs, with links to the pages they’re from.

Answers are written by AI from these docs and can be wrong: check the pages they link to.

Local development

To work on Tack itself, or try it without deploying:

Terminal window
pnpm install
pnpm dev

pnpm dev runs the Vite+ dev server (vp dev), with the Cloudflare local explorer at /cdn-cgi/local/explorer. Use it rather than cf dev.

Secrets locally

Section titled “Secrets locally”

Copy .dev.vars.example to .dev.vars (it’s ignored by git), and fill it in:

Terminal window
TACK_SECRET=<any random string>
TACK_DEV_AUTH=1   # fake sign-in, local only
GITHUB_WEBHOOK_SECRET=<any string>   # optional, for sending test webhooks

With TACK_DEV_AUTH=1, /auth/dev?login=octocat signs you in as a fake user, on localhost only. Add &admin=1 for an admin, &allow=1 to put them on the access list, &orgs=a,b to pretend they’re in allowed organisations, and &name= for a display name. Fake users have no GitHub token, so they can’t push to GitHub or read private repositories. TACK_DEV_AUTH is only read by the dev server: never set it in production.

AI locally

Section titled “AI locally”

Workers AI always runs on Cloudflare, so the dev server uses a stand-in (TACK_AI=fake) that names stacks and makes widgets, summaries and decisions from the board’s own words, with nothing sent anywhere. To try the real thing, sign in to Cloudflare (pnpm exec cf auth login) and start the dev server with TACK_DEV_AI=workers-ai pnpm dev; requests are billed to your account. The playground (/play?scenario=ai) has a pretend AI that answers in your browser, for working on the interface without either.

A GitHub App for local development

Section titled “A GitHub App for local development”

You can run /setup on localhost to create a GitHub App for development. Sign-in and installation tokens work, but GitHub can’t reach your machine, so the app’s webhook starts switched off (“Cards still load; live updates need a public URL”), and /setup’s webhook check says “Off while local”.

To try webhooks, send one yourself, signed with GITHUB_WEBHOOK_SECRET from .dev.vars:

Terminal window
node scripts/send-webhook.ts issues payload.json

Without GitHub at all

Section titled “Without GitHub at all”
  • The playground, /play, runs a board entirely in your browser, with simulated people and simulated GitHub events, and slow-motion and reduced-motion switches. ?scenario= picks a board: planning, triage, retro, silent, vote, push, writes, inbox, rules, widgets, roadmap, tracking, comments, since and more. Galleries of every state are at /play/cards, /play/changes, /play/widgets and others. The playground isn’t in production builds.
  • The demo, as at tack.social/try: the app’s dev server serves it at /play/try, and vp dev --mode try serves it alone at /try/. Both use the AI stand-in; on tack.social it asks Workers AI through the docs site’s Worker first (?ai=offline skips it).
  • The test forge, fake.tack, is a pretend GitHub: cards like fake.tack/acme/app#12 load without a network, and the whole push flow works against it.

Tests

Section titled “Tests”
Terminal window
pnpm test     # unit and integration tests
pnpm e2e      # Playwright smoke tests over /play
pnpm check    # format, lint and type check

These docs

Section titled “These docs”

The docs site is in site/, built with Astro Starlight:

Terminal window
pnpm --filter site dev       # preview the docs
pnpm --filter site build     # build them, checking every link

Screenshots come from the playground: with pnpm dev running, pnpm --filter site screenshots http://localhost:5173 takes them again, and pnpm --filter site og draws the link preview image from them.