Installation

Requirements

Node 20.19+ or 22.12+, and pnpm. Vite 8 sets that floor; older Node will fail at install rather than at build, which is the better failure.

Scaffold a new project

pnpm create colony-admin my-app
cd my-app
pnpm install
pnpm dev

The app is on http://localhost:5273.

Works with npm, yarn and bun too — the scaffolder detects which one invoked it and tells you the right commands to run next.

Or clone

git clone https://github.com/ColorlibHQ/colony.git
cd colony
pnpm install
pnpm dev

Cloning gives you the docs site, the CI workflows and the packages/ directory as well; the scaffolder leaves those out, since they belong to this project rather than yours.

Scripts

Command	What it does
pnpm dev	Dev server with the mock API running
pnpm build	Typecheck and production build — no mock server
pnpm build:demo	Production build with the mock API, for a hosted demo
pnpm preview	Serve the last build
pnpm test	Unit tests (Vitest)
pnpm test:e2e	End-to-end tests (Playwright) against a real build
pnpm lint / pnpm format	ESLint / Prettier
pnpm size	Build and check the gzip budget

build and build:demo are not interchangeable

pnpm build deliberately excludes MSW. It is a mock server; shipping it costs 152 kB plus its dependency tree, and it will happily intercept requests meant for your real API. Use build:demo only for a demo deployment.

First things to change

1. src/data, src/mocks — the demo fixtures. Delete them once your API is wired.
2. src/config/permissions.ts — roles and what each one may do.
3. src/config/navigation.ts — the single source for the sidebar, breadcrumb and command palette. Add a page here and it appears in all three.
4. src/i18n/locales/ — your copy. See Internationalisation.