Missing local development documentation

[bartekpaczek]

What Medusa version and documentation are you using?

v2

Preliminary Checks

• This issue is not a duplicate. Before opening a new issue, please search existing issues: https://github.com/medusajs/medusa/issues

Issue Summary

There is missing page on local development for Medusa v2.
https://docs.medusajs.com/usage/local-development

How can this issue be resolved?

...

Are you interested in working on this issue?

• I would like to fix this issue

[MarcinDobrzanski]

I'm referring to:
Installation Guide
Deployment Guide

These guides contain the relevant information about local development and deployment for Medusa v2. While the /usage/local-development page appears to be missing, the installation guide covers local development setup and the deployment guide provides deployment instructions.

[bartekpaczek]

I have little expirience with .js and maybe it is why, but I have trouble grasping the idea of strating new project with Medusa.
I would imagin that the way to do it would be to: fork the repo, clone it localy, install medusa from it and continue development within it. However the documentation recomennds to install it and do the development within the /src directory without having the fork of the repo, which doesn't seem to be sustainable development practice. What part am I missing?

[helloquang]

Medusa is a framework for building an e-commerce website, so you won't directly develop the project by fork it
You'll start a new project (Medusa starter) and use medusa framework to build things around it.

If there is a new version on medusa framework, update package.json in your project

[shahednasser]

Hello @bartekpaczek any reason you're looking for the link you mentioned? Did you find it used somewhere?

As mentioned by other commenters, this guide explains how to install Medusa and start your development.

I would imagin that the way to do it would be to: fork the repo, clone it localy, install medusa from it and continue development within it.

That's technically true, but the project's codebase isn't this repository. It's in the medusa-starter-default repository. This repository holds the source code for the packages you use in your project.

Our create-medusa-app CLI tool simplifies the installation process for you, which I highly recommend if you're just starting out with Medusa, but you can clone that repo if you feel more comfortable doing that and perform the installation manually. Keep in mind you'll need to setup the database and admin user, which you can use our CLI tool for.

[bug-author]

Thank you @shahednasser, I had the same thoughts as @bartekpaczek and couldn't differentiate in setup for a medusa app project vs setup for local development to contribute to medusa.

[shahednasser]

@bug-author thank you for your input.

• Which approach are you looking for, setting up Medusa or contributing?
• What is the main reason behind that confusion?

[bug-author]

@shahednasser

1. I'm looking for the contribution approach
2. The documentation have guidelines on how to setup medua for building an app, but its confusing how to set up medusa locally for contributing to it. I spent some time last week to set up this repository and then explore it. The .env bit was a little confusing too, I just copied the example env to my .env and most of the NextJs error were resolved thankfully. I'll keep exploring to get comfortable with the project.