Setting up a frontend module

Prerequisites

To work on the O3 frontend, you will need to have the following tools and technologies set up:

• Git - We use git for version control.
• Node.js - We use Node for compiling and bundling frontend code. We don’t use Node for running the backend or server. We recommend using the active LTS version and using nvm (opens in a new tab) to manage multiple versions of Node.
• Yarn - We primarily use Yarn v3 as our package manager.

Code organization

Code in O3 is organized into several domain-specific monorepos:

• openmrs-esm-core (opens in a new tab) - contains the core packages for the 3.x frontend. The packages handle ‘cross-cutting’ concerns such as error handling, extensions, react utils, the style guide, the core framework, and more.
• openmrs-esm-patient-chart (opens in a new tab) - contains the patient dashboard which renders several widgets including allergies, conditions, medications, vitals and biometrics.
• openmrs-esm-patient-management (opens in a new tab) - handles concerns related to managing patients. Includes frontend modules that handle searching for a patient, patient registration, managing patient lists, appointment scheduling and service queues.
• openmrs-esm-home (opens in a new tab) - contains the home page, which sets up the home navigation that contains links to dashboards with the appointments, patient lists, and service queues frontend modules.

Installation

Most times, you'll be working within one monorepo. Generally speaking, to set up one of these monorepos locally, you'd need to:

• Clone the repo of interest.
• cd into the root directory of the repo on your local copy and run yarn to install dependencies.

Editor setup

We typically use Visual Studio code when developing on O3. We recommend setting up the following extensions to enhance your development workflow:

• Prettier (opens in a new tab) - automatic code formatting. All our monorepos contain a Prettier configuration. Setting up this extension enables Prettier to automatically format your code each time you make a commit.
• ESLint (opens in a new tab) - static code analysis tool. ESLint finds and fixes problems in your code and will help flag lint issues as you write your code.

Next steps

Success! You are now ready to start building with O3! 🥳 Read through our contributing guide to learn how to contribute to O3. You can also read through our coding conventions guide to learn how to make high quality contributions to O3.