Until now it has been very complicated to work on the official Lemmy frontend, as you had to set up an entire local Lemmy stack with Postgres database and Rust backend built from source. Now there is a much easier way, as lemmy-ui can directly connect to a remote production or test instance.

To get started you need to have git and pnpm installed. Then run:

# for development branch (1.0):
git clone https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui --recursive
# for stable branch (0.19):
git clone https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui --recursive -b release/v0.19

# then:
cd lemmy-ui
pnpm install
LEMMY_UI_BACKEND_REMOTE=enterprise.lemmy.ml pnpm dev

Alternatively you can use ./scripts/test.sh. Finally open http://0.0.0.0:1234/ in your browser. You can replace the value for LEMMY_UI_BACKEND_REMOTE with any production instance. The local lemmy-ui connects to that instance for all API calls, so you will see the same content. All actions work as usual including login, voting, posting etc.

Note, due to breaking changes in the development version, you may need to switch branches. main is for the new 1.0 version and all new feature development is happening there. With this you can connect to the test instance voyager.lemmy.ml. release/v0.19 is the stable branch, with it you can connect to enterprise.lemmy.ml, or existing production instances. Only bug fixes should be made there.

Hopefully this will encourage some of you to contribute to lemmy-ui. If you have any experience with web development it will be easy get started.