timeline-ng

A modern rebuild of Knight Lab TimelineJS as a Svelte 5 monorepo. An experiment in vibe coding and the AT protocol.

For general information and our TimelineNG authoring tool, visit https://timeline.knightlab.com/ng/

Requirements

• Node.js ≥ 20
• pnpm ≥ 9 (npm install -g pnpm)
• Docker (for the local ATProto devnet, you may not need this)

Install

cd /path/to/timeline-ng
pnpm install

All commands below must be run from the repo root.

Run

If you are working on the code and want to preview changes, the easiest way is probably

pnpm dev

which should pick up all changes live.

Authoring tool

If for some reason you don't want to use our public authoring tool, you can run it locally -- but this won't pick up changes to the player and core packages automatically.

pnpm authoring        # → http://127.0.0.1:5174

Local ATProto devnet

When we started, we didn't want to save things to actual atmosphere accounts. There may be times in the future where we need to go back to off-network development while we try new things. We are grateful to the atproto-devnet project for providing a setup that helps us do this.

(if you're just working on incremental changes to the player or authoring tool, you probably don't need to worry about this. If you just want to have a throwaway place to save things, check out https://pds.rip/ )

To develop against a local PDS instead of Bluesky:

1. Install mkcert and run mkcert -install once.
2. Start the devnet:

   bash scripts/devnet-up.sh

3. Copy the devnet env file:

   cp packages/authoring/.env.devnet packages/authoring/.env.local

4. Run pnpm authoring and sign in with a devnet handle (e.g. alice.devnet.test).

Build & test

pnpm build            # build all packages
pnpm test:run         # run all tests
pnpm typecheck        # type-check all packages

Packages

Package	Description
packages/core	Types, date parsing, validation, i18n, TL3 adapter
packages/player	Svelte components: SlidePlayer, TimeNav, MediaDisplay
packages/authoring	Standalone authoring SPA with ATProto persistence
packages/embed	Hosted iframe embed page (?src=at://... or ?src=https://...)