Rojects

Project Documentation

Roject

Developer reference for human and agent contributors. Keep this file up to date as the project evolves.

What it is

Roject is a self-hosted, agent-based IDE for working with files and projects. It provides specialised editors for different file types — a WYSIWYG HTML editor, a CodeMirror-backed code editor, and more to come — all within a multi-panel, tab-based workspace. Projects can be hosted on a Roject server (remote) or opened directly from the local filesystem (local), making it usable both as a lightweight self-hosted CMS and as a full desktop development environment. Designed for individual developers or small teams; no external database dependency.

What exists now

Auth & accounts

User accounts are managed by rokojori-auth at account.rokojori.com — registration, login, JWT issuance, refresh token rotation, roles, and account deletion. Roject verifies the shared accessToken JWT cookie and transparently refreshes expired tokens via account.rokojori.com/api/auth/refresh-session.

Groups, projects & storage

Groups and projects with member management (viewer / editor / admin roles). Each project gets a real directory on disk at storage/<uuid>/root/ with a default index.html on creation. All data lives as JSON files in data/ — no external database.

Editor

A full editor page (/editor.html) with a 3-panel resizable layout (Left / Center / Right). Each panel holds one or more sections side by side; each section holds a <tab-container> with drag-and-drop tabs. The Left panel shows the file tree (create, rename, delete). A FileEditorRegistry routes files to the correct panel by extension: HTML → html-editor-panel (iframe, contenteditable, MutationObserver, undo/redo, Ctrl+S save); all other text formats → code-panel (CodeMirror 5, syntax highlighting, dark theme). An optional project-level workspace/editor/file-editors.json overrides the defaults.

AI chat & utilities

A rojo-chat-panel provides a streaming AI chat interface backed by LangChain + OpenAI-compatible models. A reusable <confirm-dialog> component replaces browser confirm() for destructive actions. An EmailService facade (source/server/email/) provides a sendEmail() entry point backed by a swappable EmailSender interface; the default is SMTPEmailSender (Nodemailer).

Electron desktop app

Roject runs as a standalone Windows desktop application. The Express server starts in-process inside Electron's main process. A custom login window calls the auth API directly; tokens are stored in userData/tokens.json and re-used across sessions. All requests to localhost have Authorization: Bearer injected automatically via session.webRequest.onBeforeSendHeaders. Run with npm run electron:dev.

Deployment & CI

Live at https://roject.rokojori.com on Server A. nginx handles TLS and reverse-proxies to a Node.js process managed by systemd. Auto-deploy on push to main via a Gitea webhook calling POST /api/deploy (HMAC-SHA256 verified). The deploy script runs detached so it survives the systemctl restart that kills the parent process.

What's next

Current tasks, known bugs, and longer-horizon features are tracked on the Boards.

Technical Implementation

Backend

Node.js + Express, TypeScript compiled on the fly with ts-node. Auth is handled by rokojori-auth; Roject verifies the shared accessToken JWT cookie using jsonwebtoken + cookie-parser. All entity IDs are UUIDs via crypto.randomUUID(). Start the server with npm start.

Node.js Express ts-node jsonwebtoken cookie-parser UUID IDs

Frontend — Editor Singleton & Client/Server Split

The Editor singleton (src/editor/Editor.ts) is the central hub of the frontend — it owns all open document state, the FileEditorRegistry, and the five events that panels and tab containers subscribe to (onDocumentOpened, onDocumentDirty, onDocumentSaved, onFilesChanged, onFileTypeUnknown). For the full event reference and the TypeScript compilation split between client and server, see the Editor Singleton reference.

Frontend

Vanilla HTML, raw CSS (no Tailwind, no framework). Every UI component is a custom element with its own .ts and .css file in source/components/<name>/. CSS uses the element tag as root selector with display: block. TypeScript compiles to build/app/components/ via tsconfig.client.json (module: ESNext, no bundler). HTML pages live in source/pages/ and are copied to build/app/ by scripts/copy-pages.js. Build with npm run build.

Web Components raw CSS module: ESNext no bundler tsc --build

Shared Library

A personal TypeScript library lives as a git submodule at source/library-ts/. It has two parts: browser/ (DOM-capable) and node/ (Node.js only). The browser part is compiled separately via TypeScript project references into build/app/library-ts/browser/. The node part is included by tsconfig.ts-node.json.

git submodule source/library-ts/ project references composite: true