Running the application locally#

Two ways to run the whole thing. Pick by what you are doing:

	Dev mode	Container stack
Use it for	Working on the app	Checking the container images
Starts	Quarkus dev mode + Vite, with PostgreSQL and Keycloak in containers	Everything in containers
Sign-in	Works out of the box, local accounts	Off, unless you supply Google credentials
Live reload	Yes, both sides	No
Open	`http://localhost:5173`	`http://localhost:3000`

Dev mode is the default answer. It is the only one of the two where you can sign in without external credentials.

Neither is the shape of AWS. In AWS there is no httpd: the frontend comes from an S3 bucket through CloudFront, which also routes /api/* to the backend and gives deep links their index.html. The container stack checks the images and how they run together; what only AWS does is checked in qa itself — see the deployment chapter.

Prerequisites#

A container engine — Docker Desktop or Podman. Quarkus Dev Services needs a reachable socket; with Podman, DOCKER_HOST must point at the machine's socket (see Troubleshooting).
JDK 25, Temurin. java -version should report 25. Maven comes from the wrapper.
Node 22 and npm, for the frontend.

Nothing else. In particular you need no .env file, no database installed, and no OIDC credentials of your own.

In this chapter#

Page	What it covers
Dev mode	Running backend and frontend from source, with live reload
Container stack	The Compose stack, with the images CI builds
End-to-end stack	The stack the Playwright suite runs against
Troubleshooting	What goes wrong locally, and what to do about it