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+Development Guide
+-----------------
+
+This guide is for those that want to help hack on the Slack bridge, and need some instruction on how
+to set it up. This is **not** a guide for setting up an instance for production usage.
+
+For information on how to contribute issues and or pull requests, please read [CONTRIBUTING](../CONTRIBUTING.md).
+
+## Setting up your environment
+
+This section explains how to setup Synapse, Riot and the Slack bridge for local development.
+
+### Prereqs 
+
+Ensure at the minimum you have installed:
+
+- NodeJS ( [nvm](https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm) is a good tool for this)
+- Docker (optional, but it will make your life easier)
+
+For the sake of making this easier to follow, we will create a directory in the home directory
+called `slack-bridge-env`:
+
+```bash
+mkdir ~/slack-bridge-env
+cd ~/slack-bridge-env
+```
+
+### Setting up Synapse
+
+Largely to setup Synapse, you can follow https://hub.docker.com/r/matrixdotorg/synapse and just ensure your data directory points to `~/slack-bridge-env/synapse`.  
+You will want to make sure your server name is something that routes to your local box. I tend to use the devbox hostname, but `localhost` is also sufficent.  
+You should enable registration in the `homeserver.yaml` to create a testing user.  
+You will need to add an appservice registration file in the future, but it is not imprtant for now.
+
+### Setting up Riot
+
+Setting up Riot is also quite straightforward:
+
+Create a new config called `~/slack-bridge-env/riot-config.json` with the contents needed to set defaults to your local homeserver.
+
+As an example:
+
+```json
+{
+    "default_server_config": {
+        "m.homeserver": {
+            "base_url": "http://localhost:8008",
+            "server_name": "localhost"
+        }
+    },
+    "disable_custom_urls": false,
+    "disable_guests": false,
+    "disable_login_language_selector": false,
+    "disable_3pid_login": false,
+    "brand": "Riot",
+    "defaultCountryCode": "GB",
+    "showLabsSettings": false,
+    "default_federate": true,
+    "default_theme": "light"
+}
+```
+
+Finally, run `docker run -v /home/will/git/scalar-env/riot-config.json:/app/config.json -p 8080:80 vectorim/riot-web` to start your Riot instance. You should be able to register a new user on your local synapse instance through Riot.
+
+### Setting up the bridge postgres
+
+Setting up the postgres instance for the bridge is also quite easy.
+
+```bash
+docker run -d --name slackpg -p 59999:5432 -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=pass postgres
+```
+
+You should also create a new database in preparation for using the bridge
+
+```bash
+sudo apt install postgresql-client # Ensure you have psql installed
+psql -h localhost -U postgres -W postgres
+```
+
+And then on the postgres shell
+
+```sql
+CREATE DATABASE slack
+```
+
+### Setting up the bridge
+
+Clone the bridge repo to a place of your choice, again for simplicity we will
+use the env directory. Make sure you clone your **fork** and not the upstream repo.
+
+```bash
+git clone git@github.com:your-github-username/matrix-appservice-slack.git
+cd matrix-appservice-slack
+git remote add matrix-org git@github.com:matrix-org/matrix-appservice-slack.git
+git checkout matrix-org/develop # Always base your changes off matrix-org/develop
+npm i
+npm run build
+```
+
+The steps above should make sure you are running the latest development version
+and have built the typescript. To ensure that it's all working, you can run
+`npm test` which will run the unit and integration tests. 
+
+You can follow the instructions in the [README](../README.md) to generate and update the registration file, as well as creating a testing slack app and workspace. You should enable `rtm` support in the config, as slack will not be able to push events to your local bridge.
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