In this develop directory, build the services:

bin/build

Then start the services:

bin/up

Once the services are running, open http://localhost/launchpad to create the first admin account.

To avoid running bin/build && bin/up after every code change, you can run Overleaf Community Edition in development mode, where services will automatically update on code changes.

To do this, use the included bin/dev script:

bin/dev

This will start all services using node --watch, which will automatically monitor the code and restart the services as necessary.

To improve performance, you can start only a subset of the services in development mode by providing a space-separated list to the bin/dev script:

bin/dev [service1] [service2] ... [serviceN]

If no services are named, all services will start in development mode.

When run in development mode most services expose a debugging port to which you can attach a debugger such as the inspector in Chrome's Dev Tools or one integrated into an IDE. The following table shows the port exposed on the host machine for each service:

To attach to a service using Chrome's remote debugging, go to chrome://inspect/ and make sure Discover network targets is checked. Next click Configure... and add an entry localhost:[service port] for each of the services you want to attach a debugger to.

After adding an entry, the service will show up as a Remote Target that you can inspect and debug.