Manual Installation (Local Development)

Prerequisites

• Node.js — the app itself (NestJS 12) boots on v20.19+, but the backend test runner (Vitest 5) refuses to start below v22.12, so use v22.12+ to actually run npm test.
• PostgreSQL — the repo ships docker-compose.dev.yml to start one locally (also Redis and Mailpit), or point DATABASE_URL at your own instance
• npm

Steps

1. Clone the project:

   git clone https://github.com/invoicerr-app/invoicerr.git
   cd invoicerr

2. Backend setup:

   cd backend
   npm install
   npx prisma generate
   npm run start

   PDF generation (every document type shares one renderer — quotes, invoices, credit notes, expenses, received invoices, purchase orders, goods receipts) needs a Chromium/Chrome binary. Outside the Docker image nothing provides one automatically, so run npx playwright-core install chromium once to fetch a matching build — or point CHROMIUM_EXECUTABLE_PATH at a browser you already have (see backend/.env.example).

3. Frontend setup, in a new terminal:

   cd frontend
   npm install
   npm run start

4. Open in your browser:

   • Frontend: http://localhost:5173
   • API: http://localhost:3000

Running end-to-end tests (Cypress)

1. Start the backend and frontend with the test environment variables:

   cd backend && npm run start:test &
   cd frontend && npm run start:test &

   Make sure you have a .env.test file in each directory.

2. In another terminal, run Cypress:

   cd e2e
   npm install
   npm run e2e:open # or npm run e2e:run

In CI, the GitHub Actions workflow runs these steps automatically.