Installation¶

Prerequisites¶

Go 1.26 or later
Node.js 20 or later (only needed if you're building the web UI from source or doing frontend development — the released binary embeds a prebuilt copy)
Dolt — the MySQL-compatible, Git-like database VisionStudio stores initiatives, RMIs, and evaluations in

Clone the Repository¶

git clone https://github.com/ProductBuildersHQ/visionstudio.git
cd visionstudio

Sibling Repos (building from source)¶

VisionStudio's go.work workspace pulls a few packages from sibling repos checked out next to visionstudio/, rather than only from published module versions:

../../grokify/prism-maturity
../../grokify/prism-roadmap
../../plexusone/devfolio
../prism-build

If you don't have these checked out, go build/go run still works — Go falls back to the published module versions pinned in go.mod — but you won't pick up local changes to those repos. Contributors working across repos should clone them at the paths above.

Build¶

go build -o bin/visionstudio ./cmd/visionstudio

Initialize the Database¶

./bin/visionstudio db init --migrate

This bootstraps a Dolt database at ~/.productbuildershq/visionstudio (override with --data-dir, or point at an existing MySQL-compatible server with --dsn).

Verify Installation¶

Start everything with one command — this starts the database (if it isn't already running) and serves the web UI + API, opening your browser:

./bin/visionstudio app start

You should see the VisionStudio dashboard open at http://localhost:9400. Press Ctrl-C to stop; if app start started the database itself, it stops that too on exit.

Running the pieces separately¶

./bin/visionstudio db start              # start the database in the background
./bin/visionstudio ui --port 9400        # serve the UI + API, connecting to the running database
./bin/visionstudio db stop               # stop the background database when done

Use ./bin/visionstudio db status to check whether the database is reachable, and ./bin/visionstudio --help for the full command list.

Building the Web UI from Source¶

The released binary embeds a prebuilt web/dist. If you're changing frontend code, rebuild it before building the Go binary so the new assets get embedded:

cd web
npm install
npm run build
cd ..
go build -o bin/visionstudio ./cmd/visionstudio

For frontend development with hot reload instead, see Development Setup.