Developer Onboarding

Start here · five minutes from a fresh checkout to a daemon you have watched work, by hand

Working with a coding agent? Start with Onboard your agent: one prompt sets up all three repositories. This page is the same setup by hand.

By hand

1. Set up. Check out the standard at ../pulse-mesh; every manifest here reaches it there. rust-toolchain.toml pins the Rust version, and rustup installs it on the first cargo command.
2. See it work.

   cargo install --path tools/pms --locked
   cargo install --path mesh/mesh-hub --locked
   pms doctor
   pms demo
   

   pms doctor checks the toolchain and the environment. pms demo starts a daemon, passes five messages from a producer to a consumer through it, prints each one, and stops the daemon.
3. Run a mesh yourself. Two programs talk through the daemon starts a daemon and moves envelopes between terminals, programs and languages.
4. Prove the tree. scripts/gate.sh --quick runs the per-commit checks; scripts/gate.sh runs the gate a change passes before it merges. A check whose tool is missing fails and prints the command that installs it.

From there, An agent swarm puts a planner and two workers on the mesh.

Before your first change

• CONTRIBUTING.md says what a contribution means during the beta, holds the table of every check the gate runs, and gives the four-question test for where new code goes, which Workspace Layout explains.
• AGENTS.md lists the rules every change keeps, for a person as much as for an agent: a port-protocol change moves the specification, the fixtures and both thin clients together; the daemon stays on loopback; unsafe only with a // SAFETY: comment; decision records added and never rewritten.
• The specification is normative, the rustdoc is the API contract, and the Decision log records why the non-obvious calls were made. This book explains and guides; where it and the code disagree, one of them is wrong.

Where to read first

• mesh/mesh-hub-runtime/src/lib.rs: the in-process event bus (PulseHub) the mesh-hub daemon wraps.
• mesh/mesh-hub/src/: the daemon, its transports, its per-connection loop, and the bridge to the hub.
• mesh/mesh-port-protocol/src/lib.rs and fixtures/: the messages every client speaks, and the frames the thin clients are held to.
• mesh/mesh-client/src/client.rs: the Rust client (Mesh), which dev-hub re-exports.
• tools/pms/src/main.rs and src/commands/: the pms command line, the most concrete tour of what the daemon does.