Running a development build

First, follow the Environment Setup.

Client#

The client is not meant to be run by itself, despite being described as an app. See the documentation on the server instead.

Server#

• To run the server in development mode, run server:start. The dev port is 8080.
• To run the server in production mode (with its own copy of the assets), run server:start-prod.
• To build for Docker, see Docker.

To run with a custom port, change the TRILIUM_PORT environment variable from the package.json.

Desktop#

• To run in development mode, use pnpm desktop:start.
• To run in production mode, use pnpm desktop:start-prod.

Safe mode#

Safe mode is off by default, to enable it temporarily on a Unix shell, prepend the environment variable setting:

pnpm cross-env TRILIUM_SAFE_MODE=1 pnpm server:start

Running on NixOS#

When doing development, the Electron binary retrieved from NPM is not going to be compatible with NixOS, resulting in errors when trying to run it. However Trilium handles it automatically when running pnpm desktop:start.

If there's no electron the system path it will attempt to use nix-shell to obtain it.