Skip to main content

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://mintlify.com/Fixius50/WorlBuilding-Writting-App/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

This guide walks you through running Chronos Atlas on your local machine and creating your first Workspace. By the end you will have the frontend Vite dev server and the Java auxiliary backend both running, with the app open in your browser and ready to start building a world.

​
Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure the following are installed on your machine:
  • Node.js 18 or later — required to run the Vite dev server and install frontend dependencies
  • Java 21 — required to compile and run the auxiliary Spring/Jetty backend
  • Maven — used to build the backend; the repository ships with mvnw.cmd (Windows) so a global Maven install is optional

​
Steps

1

Clone the repository

Clone the Chronos Atlas repository from GitHub and navigate into the project root.
git clone https://github.com/Fixius50/WorlBuilding-Writting-App.git
cd WorlBuilding-Writting-App
2

Install frontend dependencies

Navigate into the frontend directory and install the Node.js dependencies with npm.
cd frontend
npm install
This installs React 19, Vite 6, TanStack Query, MapLibre, Tiptap, SQLocal, Zustand, and the rest of the frontend stack declared in frontend/package.json.
3

Start the auxiliary backend

The Java backend is a lightweight Spring Web MVC + Jetty server that runs locally on port 8080. Start it from the backend directory using the bundled Maven wrapper.
cd backend
mvnw.cmd compile exec:java -Dexec.mainClass=com.worldbuilding.core.AuxServerApplication
Wait until the console confirms the server is listening on port 8080 before proceeding to the next step.
4

Start the frontend

Open a new terminal, navigate to the frontend directory, and start the Vite development server.
cd frontend
npm run dev
Vite will print a local URL (typically http://localhost:5173). Open that URL in your browser.
5

Open the app and create a Workspace

With the browser open, you will see the Workspace Selector — the home screen of Chronos Atlas. Click New Workspace, give your world a name, and confirm. This creates a new SQLite database entry in your browser’s OPFS storage.From there, the Architect Panel opens with the module sidebar on the left. Select any module — World Bible, Timelines, Maps, Linguistics, or Graph — to start building.
On Windows, skip steps 3 and 4 entirely by running the orchestration script from the scripts/ directory:
scripts\run-app.bat
The script automatically kills any process occupying port 8080, starts the Java backend in the background, waits until it is ready, finds a free port for the frontend (starting at 5173), and launches npm run dev — all in a single terminal window.

​
Building for Production

When you are ready to produce optimized output for distribution, build each layer separately. 
cd frontend
npm run build
The frontend build emits static assets to frontend/dist/. The Maven Shade plugin packages an executable JAR at backend/target/aux-server-1.0.0.jar with all dependencies bundled.

​
Architecture Guardrails Check

The frontend ships with an automated script that validates Feature-Sliced Architecture rules — detecting illegal deep cross-feature imports and business logic leaking into the Shared kernel. 
cd frontend
npm run arch:check
The report is written to frontend/reports/architecture-guard-report.json. To make the check fail on violations (useful in CI), use the strict variant: 
npm run arch:check:strict
The auxiliary backend is optional for most workflows. If it is not running, writing prose, editing the relationship graph, and managing World Bible entries all continue to work normally. Only backend-dependent features — such as filesystem backups and heavy exports — will be unavailable.

Build docs developers (and LLMs) love

Get started for freeTalk to us