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Bare-Metal Local Development Installation

This guide walks you through compiling and running Bruce directly on your local workstation without Docker.

1. Prerequisites

1. Go Toolchain

  • Go 1.23 or newer is required: 
    go version

2. C Compiler (CGO Required)

Bruce uses mattn/go-sqlite3, which requires CGO to compile SQLite: - macOS: Install Xcode Command Line Tools: 

xcode-select --install
- Linux (Ubuntu/Debian): Install build-essential: 
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y build-essential
- Linux (Fedora/RHEL): 
sudo dnf groupinstall "Development Tools"

3. Redis Instance

Bruce requires Redis for Asynq job queues: - macOS (Homebrew): 

brew install redis
brew services start redis
- Linux: 
sudo apt-get install redis-server
sudo systemctl start redis-server
- Docker (Alternative): 
docker run -d --name local-redis -p 6379:6379 redis:7-alpine

2. Compiling & Running

  1. Clone the repository: 

    git clone https://github.com/DemitriusQuadros/bruce.git
cd bruce

  2. Configure config.yml: 

    cp config.example.yml config.yml
    Ensure redis.addr points to localhost:6379: 
    server:
  port: 8080

redis:
  addr: "localhost:6379"

claude:
  api_key: "sk-ant-api03-..."

  3. Run directly with go run: 

    CGO_ENABLED=1 go run cmd/bruce/main.go

  4. Or compile a binary: 

    CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -o bin/bruce ./cmd/bruce
./bin/bruce

  5. Verify: Open http://localhost:8080 in your web browser.

3. Running the Test Suite

# Run all unit and integration tests
go test -v ./...

# Run tests with race condition detector
CGO_ENABLED=1 go test -race ./...

# Static analysis
go vet ./...

4. Frontend Development

Bruce's web interface uses modern Vanilla JavaScript, CSS, and HTML embedded in the Go binary: - Frontend assets are located in web/public/. - No Node.js build step, bundler, or transpilation is required. - If you edit files in web/public/, re-run go run cmd/bruce/main.go to re-embed the updated files.

Optional: Playwright E2E Tests

To run the automated browser tests against the web interface: 

npm install
npx playwright test