Getting Started

This guide gets a fresh laptop running the full Matters AI stack — public website, workspace, and this docs site — in under ten minutes.

Prerequisites#

• Node.js 22+ (we ship to Vercel which runs Node 22 LTS).
• pnpm 9+ — the only supported package manager. corepack enable && corepack prepare pnpm@9.15.0 --activate.
• Git with SSH access to the GitHub repo.
• A Clerk development instance (ask infra for the test publishable + secret keys).
• A MongoDB connection string (Atlas dev cluster or local docker).
• WordPress credentials for the staging instance (used by the blog/content pipelines).

Clone & install#

git clone git@github.com:matters-ai/website.git
cd website
pnpm install

pnpm install is workspace-aware: it links @matters/auth, @matters/lib, @matters/ui, @matters/config and connects them to the apps under apps/.

Environment variables#

Copy env.example to .env.local at the repo root, then fill in the values you have. The Environment Variables reference lists every variable, whether it's required, and which app needs it.

Heads-up: the workspace app (apps/workspace) reads the same env vars but expects them in its own Vercel project once deployed. Locally it picks them up from the repo root automatically.

Run the apps#

In separate terminals:

# Public website (matters.ai)
pnpm dev                              # :4000

# Workspace (workspace.matters.ai)
pnpm --filter @matters/workspace dev  # :4001

# These docs
pnpm --filter @matters/webdocs dev    # :4002

All three share the same MongoDB and Clerk instance.

Common tasks#

• Add a page to the workspace → see Workspace → Modules.
• Add an API route with RBAC → see API Reference → Workspace Routes.
• Add a doc page here → drop a page.mdx under the matching apps/webdocs/app/<slug>/ directory and link it from apps/webdocs/lib/nav.ts.

Verifying your setup#

pnpm run type:check                       # root app only (tsc --noEmit)
pnpm --filter @matters/workspace type:check
pnpm --filter @matters/webdocs type:check

All three should exit clean. If they don't, your setup is wrong — file in #eng-infra before continuing.