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Development & contributing

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lit-monitor is open source under the MIT License, and contributions are genuinely welcome — whether that's a bug report, a docs fix, a new field-specific starter config, or a feature. The project grows from people using it on their own libraries, so feedback from real use is the most valuable thing you can send.

The code lives at github.com/max3925vats/lit-monitor.

Contributing code

git clone https://github.com/max3925vats/lit-monitor.git
cd lit-monitor
./install.sh

The script installs uv if needed, creates a project-local .venv, resolves all dependencies, and seeds working configs from config/*.example.yaml. From there the usual loop applies: branch, make a small focused change, open a pull request. Issues and PRs are the right place to discuss anything non-trivial before investing a lot of work — open one early and we can shape the approach together.

The developer page

Start the server with the --dev flag to mount an extra page at /dev:

lit-monitor serve --dev

It's a hands-on diagnostic and sandbox surface, useful whether you're hacking on lit-monitor or just want to watch the pipeline work end-to-end on a throwaway copy:

  • Trace a paper end-to-end — paste a Markdown paper (or pull one from Zotero) and watch each stage run: chunking, two-phase extraction, embedding, graph, and the Obsidian note. Every step is inspectable.
  • Health and service checks — the same diagnose / check probes the CLI runs, in the browser.
  • Discovery dry-run — exercise the search-and-rank path without ingesting.
  • Graph backfill — populate the knowledge graph with a live log stream.

Everything on /dev runs against an isolated sandbox (separate state DB, ChromaDB collections, and a Literature/_Dev/ vault subfolder) with a one-click "clear sandbox" — so it never touches your real library.

Reporting bugs & requesting features

Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue:

Or browse all issues. The bug form asks for your version, OS, install method, and steps to reproduce — and for setup or connectivity problems, the output of lit-monitor diagnose is the single most helpful thing to include.

Never paste secrets

Scrub API keys, tokens, and library credentials out of any logs or config you attach to an issue.