Hollyhock Developer and Customization Guide

Status: General guidance. Exact source inventory, frameworks, schema, build steps, and extension points will be published with a verified release.

Inspect before editing

Read the architecture overview, system requirements, installation guide, release notes, and license. Inspect the current project and its permission model before proposing a change. Use reversible branches and fictional test records.

Preserve agency and care boundaries

Maintain agency/office separation, role-based access, user-scoped controls, audit history, protected enrollment, assigned caregiver work, family/client boundaries, and safe update/recovery behavior. Keep Approach, Location, EVV, Time, Travel, and Care Delivery separate. Do not use a single location action to create unrelated work or pay records.

Test and release

Test authorization boundaries, office transitions, offline queues, interrupted updates, recovery, schedule assignment, family visibility, and audit events as relevant to the approved change. Do not modify production data or claim a physical field acceptance test has passed unless it has actually been performed and recorded.

The customer may use internal IT, contractors, editors, and third-party development tools under the license and applicable privacy/security obligations. See the AI-assisted development guide.

Working on the code manually

AI tools are optional. You can use the included guides with your own editor, IDE, development team, contractor, or command-line workflow.

1. Locate the exact source version and read its architecture, system requirements, license, and release notes.
2. Make a protected backup or version-control checkpoint.
3. Inspect affected server/client code, access controls, office/agency boundaries, storage, and migrations.
4. Keep edits scoped and review migration/recovery behavior before changing data structures.
5. Run the exact release checks and tests against an isolated database with fictional records.
6. Stage the change and verify permissions, audit history, offline queue preservation, and GPS event separation.
7. Deploy deliberately only after the release gate, backup, and approved operational procedure are complete.

The current public source guide supplies Node.js/npm build checks, but not an approved production deployment recipe. Verify missing commands against the release-specific installation notes; do not infer a production topology from local development setup.