shell

Every screen people actually use.

The web application for Kern. It installs like an app, works in four languages including right-to-left ones, and follows the system's light or dark setting.

Each Kern module contributes its own screens, navigation and command-palette actions here. The shell composes whatever a workspace has switched on and knows nothing about any particular feature.

Run it

Goal: open Kern's interface on your own machine.

You need:

• Node 24 and pnpm 10.

Run it against demo data

This is the fastest way to see the whole interface. It needs no database, no services and no setup.

pnpm install
pnpm dev:mock

Expected result: the app is at http://localhost:5173, already signed in, with a workspace full of issues and conversations.

Run it against real services

If you want the app talking to a real backend, start everything from the umbrella repository:

pnpm setup
pnpm infra
pnpm dev

Expected result: the app is at http://localhost:5173 and calls core on port 4000.

Test it

pnpm test       # unit tests
pnpm test:e2e   # the interface, driven in a real browser against demo data

Expected result: both report all tests passed.

Things worth knowing

• DESIGN.md is the authority. It is taken from the product's own design file: exact colours, sizes and the anatomy of every view. Match it rather than inventing.
• Use the design tokens that exist. They are listed in @kernhq/ui. A token nobody defined resolves to nothing, and the result looks almost right, which is worse than looking broken.
• The sidebar belongs to whichever module you are in. A module fills it by contributing a sidebar.widget slot — that is how chat puts conversations there.
• Every string goes through the message catalogue in messages/. No English is written into a component.
• The layout must survive dir="rtl". Use logical CSS properties. Never left or right.

If a change does not appear

Problem: you edited a component, and the browser still shows the old one.

Cause: a second dev server is running and serving stale code.

Solution:

1. Run lsof -ti:5173.
2. If it prints more than one process id, stop all of them.
3. Run pnpm dev:mock again.

Contributing

Read CONTRIBUTING.md, DESIGN.md and CLAUDE.md.

Licence

AGPL-3.0-only. This repository is part of the Kern product. The Kern framework you build modules against is Apache-2.0 — see LICENSING.md.

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Kern — one place for your team's work: issues, conversations, documents and people. Open source, self-hosted. kernaio.com · github.com/KernAIO