Development Guide

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Frontend Dev Mode (Disk-First Assets)

The collector binary embeds frontend assets via RustEmbed at compile time. By default, every frontend change requires recompiling the collector (cargo build --release) to take effect.

To speed up frontend development, set the AGENTSIGHT_FRONTEND_DIST environment variable to serve assets directly from disk. This way you only need to rebuild the frontend and restart the collector — no Rust recompilation needed.

Usage

# 1. Build the frontend
make build-frontend
 
# 2. Start the collector with disk-based frontend assets
AGENTSIGHT_FRONTEND_DIST=./frontend/dist sudo -E ./target/release/agentsight record -c claude --binary-path <path>

After each frontend change:

make build-frontend
# Restart the collector — changes take effect immediately, no cargo build needed

How it works

• On startup, the collector checks for the AGENTSIGHT_FRONTEND_DIST environment variable.
• Set — serves files directly from the specified directory, skipping the embedded asset extraction. The directory must contain index.html.
• Not set — falls back to the default behavior: extracts RustEmbed assets to a temp directory and cleans up on exit.

Notes

• Use sudo -E to preserve the environment variable when running with sudo.
• The path can be relative (e.g., ./frontend/dist) or absolute.
• In production, do not set this variable — the embedded assets will be used as usual.