Prepare the environment

NEST Desktop is written in Vue.js (a web framework written in TypeScript), and also in TypeScript. The Vue code is transpiled to HTML5 and JavaScript Code. There are multiple ways to develop Vue applications, but my preferred way to develop NEST Desktop is to use Node.js (and optionally Yarn).

Requirements

  • Node.js LTS (v24 or higher), Yarn

  • NEST Simulator 3.8 or higher

You can install these requirements in the host system. First install nvm which is a cross-platform Node.js version manager. See detailed steps on https://nodejs.org/en/download.

For Linux/macOS developer execute these command lines in terminal:

# Download and install nvm:
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.40.3/install.sh | bash

# in lieu of restarting the shell
\. "$HOME/.nvm/nvm.sh"

# Download and install Node.js:
nvm install 24

# Verify the Node.js version:
node -v # Should print "v24.7.0".

# Download and install Yarn:
corepack enable yarn

# Verify Yarn version:
yarn -v

Commands

Install node modules for NEST Desktop:

yarn install

Start a development server:

yarn dev

Note

The command yarn serve uses the configuration file vue.config.js. This file controls the threads used for the linting (the statical-syntactical code checks). With the default configuration, all available threads are used to minimize the build time. This might slow down other programs. There are cases where you cannot afford that and prefer a slightly longer execution time. In that cases, you can either adjust the number of threads in that file.This reduces the CPU load, but some CPU resources might stay unused. Alternatively you can execute the console in which you want to spawn the yarn command with a lower priority. On Linux (even on MacOS or Windows using WSL2 and an available shell command) this can be done using

nice -n 20 bash

This will spawn a new console inside your current console, but with the lowest processing priority possible, i.e. this console and its tasks do not block other tasks (like video conferences, etc.) significantly. Do not be confused that there will be no new window and no major visual cues that you are now in another process. In that console you can now execute the commands mentioned above.


Useful commands

Check if any node modules are outdated:

yarn outdated

Upgrade outdated node modules:

yarn upgrade