project-pulse: Instructions file for Claude Code

CLAUDE.md

This file provides guidance to Claude Code (claude.ai/code) when working with code in this repository.

Project Overview

Project Pulse is a web application for managing senior design / capstone course projects. Students submit weekly activity reports and peer evaluations; instructors monitor progress via dashboards. It also includes a Requirements Authoring & Management (RAM) module that lets student teams define software requirements before coding — project glossary, vision and scope, use cases, business rules, software requirements specifications, and traceability.

RAM functionality is built spec-first: its requirements live as Markdown under docs/requirements/ and drive implementation through the /design → /implement workflow. See Spec-driven development below before adding or changing RAM features.

The overarching development methodology these workflows instantiate — spec-driven and agent-assisted, with a breadth-complete, depth-shallow architecture validated by a thin vertical slice before fanning out per use case — is written up in docs/methodology.md.

Starting the Project

All three services must be running for local development. Run them in this order:

1. Docker services (MySQL on 3306, Mailpit SMTP on 1025 / web UI on 8025):

   docker-compose up -d
   

2. Backend (Spring Boot on port 80, dev profile with seed data):

   cd backend
   mvnw.cmd spring-boot:run       # Windows
   ./mvnw spring-boot:run          # macOS/Linux
   

3. Frontend (Vite dev server on http://localhost:5173):

   cd frontend
   npm install
   npm run dev
   

The app is ready at http://localhost:5173. Mailpit UI is at http://localhost:8025.

Stopping the Project

1. Backend & Frontend: Kill processes by port to avoid affecting other Java/Node processes:

   # Windows (PowerShell) — backend on port 80, frontend on port 5173
   (Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort 80 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue).OwningProcess | ForEach-Object { Stop-Process -Id $_ -Force }
   (Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort 5173 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue).OwningProcess | ForEach-Object { Stop-Process -Id $_ -Force }
   
   # macOS/Linux
   lsof -ti:80 | xargs kill
   lsof -ti:5173 | xargs kill
   

2. Docker services:

   docker-compose down