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.

Or clone

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

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.