DevLog

DevLog is a personal application for recording technical knowledge gained while developing projects.

It combines a technical journal with a project dashboard. Use it to document issues, solution attempts, lessons learned, technologies, important commands, and useful links for each project.

Release status

The MVP 1.0 workflows for projects and the technical journal are complete in the API and web application. The current frontend also implements account settings, Activity Timeline, and Knowledge Overview; see docs/backlog/frontend.md.

Current capabilities

• User registration, login, logout, profile viewing, and name/password updates;
• Project creation, listing, filtering, editing, and lifecycle management;
• Project detail views that aggregate technologies, technical entries, commands, resources, and environments, with create/edit/remove workflows for project data;
• Project settings for metadata and local path, archive/restore actions, and protected permanent deletion;
• Technical entries for issues (ISSUE) and lessons learned (LEARNING);
• Paginated active and archived technical journals with title, type, status, and tag filters, Markdown rendering, creation, editing, and entry detail pages;
• Tag assignment and removal, solution-attempt management, and issue resolve/reopen workflows in the web application;
• Technical entry archiving, restoration, and confirmed deletion;
• Quick Capture from the sidebar, using the regular technical-entry flow;
• Dedicated tag, technology, and environment pages;
• Activity Timeline with active entries grouped by local creation day, project and type filters, and incremental loading;
• Knowledge Overview with journal totals, current issue composition, recent learnings and resolutions, and project-scoped links to the journal;
• Ownership checks that restrict authenticated users to their own data.

The account page displays the signed-in user's name and email. The settings page lets the user update their name and change their password. Email remains read-only under the current API contract.

Timeline and overview summarize the current, unarchived journal. They do not store a permanent history of edits or lifecycle actions.

Technologies

• Monorepo with pnpm Workspaces and Turborepo;
• NestJS, Prisma, and PostgreSQL backend;
• React, Vite, and TypeScript frontend;
• Database running in Docker.

Structure

apps/
  api/      # NestJS API
  web/      # React interface
docker/     # PostgreSQL configuration
docs/       # Project decisions and guides

Available frontend routes

The web application currently exposes:

Route	Purpose
/	Public introduction to DevLog; no authentication required
/dashboard	Authenticated workspace overview with recent projects and entries
/account	Authenticated account details
/settings	Update the profile name and change the password
/activity-timeline	Active journal entries grouped by local creation day
/knowledge-overview	Journal totals, issue composition, and recent knowledge
/projects	Paginated project list with search, filters, and creation
/projects/:projectId	Project overview, entries, technologies, environments, commands, resources, and settings
/technical-entries	Paginated active technical journal with search, filters, and optional projectId URL scope
/technical-entries/:technicalEntryId	Technical entry details, content editing, and lifecycle actions
/technical-entries/archived	Paginated archived technical entries
/tags	Search and manage tags
/technologies	Search technologies recorded on projects
/environments	Search and filter environments across owned projects

The project settings area supports editing, archiving, restoring, and permanently deleting an unarchived project after confirmation. Quick Capture is available as a sidebar action rather than a separate route.

Getting started

Prerequisites: Node.js, pnpm 11.21.0, and Docker.

1. Install dependencies:

   pnpm install

2. Create a root .env file with PostgreSQL credentials, for example:

   POSTGRES_DB=devlog
   POSTGRES_USER=devlog
   POSTGRES_PASSWORD=devlog
   POSTGRES_PORT=5432

3. Start the PostgreSQL database:

   pnpm db:up

4. Run the applications in development mode:

   pnpm dev

You can also run them separately with pnpm --filter api dev and pnpm --filter web dev.

The API is served at http://localhost:3000/api and Vite usually serves the frontend at http://localhost:5173.

Useful commands

pnpm build                        # Build the projects
pnpm lint                         # Run lint checks
pnpm test                         # Run available tests
pnpm --filter api test:integration # Run API integration tests against the test database
pnpm --filter api test:e2e         # Run API HTTP end-to-end tests
pnpm db:down                      # Stop the database
pnpm db:logs                      # View database logs

Documentation

Documentation is organized by type, with an index to help you find answers:

• docs/README.md: documentation entry point, mapping questions to relevant files;
• docs/decisions/: product, architecture, and database decisions;
• docs/guides/: technical explanations and workflows;
• docs/usecases/: expected behavior and system rules;
• docs/backlog/: tasks and known pending work.

If you are new to the project, start with docs/README.md after reading the setup instructions above.

English is the standard language for the application, documentation, API messages, and code comments. See AGENTS.md for repository guidelines.

After MVP 1.0

Account settings, Activity Timeline, and Knowledge Overview are implemented in the current working tree. Their status and scope are tracked in docs/backlog/frontend.md.