The Forge is a Laravel-based web application that provides a platform for the Single Player Tarkov community to share and discover user-generated content, such as mods, guides, and other tools. It is currently under heavy development. Please review this entire document before attempting to contribute, especially the "Development Discussion" section.

We use Laravel Herd for local development. Herd Pro is recommended as it includes MySQL, Redis, Meilisearch, and Mailpit out of the box. Herd Free works for lighter development tasks but lacks these services, so some features (search indexing, queued jobs, etc.) will be limited.

• Laravel Herd (Pro recommended)
• Composer (bundled with Herd)
• Node.js & npm (bundled with Herd)

1. Clone the repository and point Herd to the project directory.

2. Copy the environment file and generate an application key:

   # Herd Pro (recommended):
   cp .env.example .env
   
   # Herd Free (limited):
   cp .env.light .env
   

   If using .env.light, update DB_DATABASE to the absolute path to your database/database.sqlite file.

3. Install dependencies:

   composer install
   npm install
   

4. Generate an application key:

   php artisan key:generate
   

5. Start the Herd Pro services (if using Herd Pro):

   Open Herd and ensure the following services are running:

   Service	Purpose	Default Port
   MySQL	Database	3306
   Redis	Cache, sessions, and queues	6379
   Meilisearch	Full-text search	7700
   Mailpit	Local email testing	8025
   Reverb	WebSocket broadcasting	443

   Create a forge database in MySQL:

   mysql -u root -e "CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS forge"
   

6. Migrate and seed the database:

   php artisan migrate:fresh --seed
   

7. Start the dev server:

   composer run dev
   

   This starts the application server, queue listener, log viewer, and Vite dev server concurrently.

8. Sync search indexes (Herd Pro only, requires Horizon running):

   php artisan horizon
   php artisan app:search-sync
   

For more information on Laravel development, please refer to the official documentation.