Developer's Guide

We use Visual Studio Code for developing LoopBack and recommend the same to our contributors.

While this package supports both Node.js 6.x and 8.x versions, you will need Node.js 8.x (or newer) for the best development experience in VS Code.

VSCode setup

Install the following extensions:

Start the build task (Cmd+Shift+B), it will run TypeScript compiler in backround, watching and recompiling files as you change them. Compilation errors will be shown in the VSCode's "PROBLEMS" window.
Execute "Test and lint" task (Cmd+Shift+T) to re-run the test suite and lint the code for both programming and style errors. Linting errors will be shown in VSCode's "PROBLEMS" window. Failed tests are printed to terminal output only.
Run npm test explicitly before committing your changes. This will execute the same sequence as our CI server does.

Open a new terminal window/tab and start the continuos build process via npm run build:watch. It will run TypeScript compiler in watch mode, recompiling files as you change them. Any compilation errors will be printed to this terminal.
In your main terminal window/tab, run npm run test:dev to re-run the test suite and lint the code for both programming and style errors. You should run this command manually whenever you have new changes to test. Test failures and linter errors will be printed to this terminal.
Run npm test explicitly before committing your changes. This will execute the same sequence as our CI server does.