Tooling

The developer toolchain - pnpm, Nx, vite-plus, and the testing conventions that keep the monorepo predictable.

The repository is a pnpm workspace orchestrated by Nx, with vite-plus (vp) as the developer-experience toolchain for linting, testing, formatting, and typechecking. This section documents how it fits together.

Africa OS deliberately keeps its toolchain small: pnpm for packages, Nx for task orchestration, and vite-plus for the quality gates.

• pnpm owns the dependency graph: workspaces, the catalog, and the lockfile. It is the package manager for the entire repository. The pinned version is pnpm@11.20.0 (enforced by packageManager in the root package.json).
• Nx owns running tasks across the workspace: it understands the dependency graph, caches results, and runs only what changed. Root scripts like pnpm dev delegate to Nx.
• vite-plus (aliased as vp) owns the per-package quality gates: linting, tests, typechecking, and formatting. Every package’s lint, test, and typecheck scripts call vp.
• tsx runs the infrastructure scripts under infra/database/scripts (exposed as pnpm db:*).

The rule of thumb

Use vp (or the pnpm scripts that wrap it) for installs, builds, tests, linting, and typechecking - not raw tool binaries. Keep shared tool versions in the catalog so every package stays on the same toolchain.

Quality expectations

The project’s standards live in .patterns/ at the repository root - read docs.md and testing.md before writing or changing docs and tests. The two hard rules that touch the toolchain:

• Always use pnpm - never npm or bare yarn.
• Always use vp for installs, builds, and test/lint/typecheck runs rather than calling the underlying binaries directly.

Database scripts

Database chores are plain tsx scripts under infra/database/scripts, exposed as root pnpm db:* commands. See Migrations for how they work.