I’m trying to contribute to the OpenMRS project and specifically want to work on improving the Help Menu feature. I’ve cloned the openmrs-esm-core repo and successfully ran yarn to install dependencies.
However, whenever I run yarn setup, my laptop completely crashes and becomes unresponsive. I’ve tried multiple times but the issue persists. Since I only want to work on the Help Menu feature, I’m wondering:
Is there a lightweight way to run just the Help Menu module without going through the full yarn setup process?
Or is there a minimal environment setup guide that lets me work on a single app/module like Help Menu?
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much for your time!
@backloguy The system crash during yarn setup is likely due to resource exhaustion - this command can be very memory/CPU intensive, especially on lower-spec machines.
Workaround:
Skip yarn setup entirely - since you’ve already run yarn successfully, try running: yarn build or if you’re still hitting resource limits run yarn build --concurrency 1then spin up your server to serve your frontend.
yarn setup often performs additional tooling configuration that may not be essential for basic development
yarn build compiles the modules you need without the overhead of full environment setup
The --concurrency 1 flag limits parallel processing to reduce memory usage
If you want to work on the Help Menu, in place of yarn setup, try the lightweight way by using yarn dev.
After that, try to locate packages/esm-help-menu-app and use yarn start — it will work. Use openmrs-esm-devtools (recommended), or create an importmap.override.json in your root project.