This section is for people who want to build, modify, or contribute to privacytracker — not for people who just want to run it. If you’re looking to install and use privacytracker, the Self-Host tab is what you want.

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Who this section is for

You want to build from source

Maybe to run on Windows or Linux desktop (where prebuilt binaries aren’t published yet), or to try a change before opening a PR.

You want to contribute

Bug fixes, new privacy-label parsers, additional locales, or new dashboard widgets.

You're integrating with the API

Building tools on top of privacytracker’s app/api/** routes — e.g. piping snapshots into your own data pipeline.

You want to understand internals

The data flow, the three crash-safe runners, the focus-driven feature-flag system, or the translations workflow.

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Where to start

1

Build from source

Clone the repo, install Node 24, and run npm run dev. Full walkthrough in Build from source.
2

Read the architecture overview

Architecture covers the codebase shape, the seven-step scrape→snapshot→diff→notify loop, the SQLite model, and the three crash-safe bulk runners.
3

Understand the feature-flag system

Every user-facing surface is gated by a focus model: audience × goals × accessibility. Feature flags explains the resolver, the storage model, and how to add a new flag.
4

Contribute translations

locales/en.json is the source of truth. Other locales round-trip through Crowdin. See Translations for the workflow.

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Tooling

Day-to-day commands you’ll actually use:

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Repo layout at a glance

Anything not here — release pipeline, code signing, the GitHub Actions that publish notarized builds — is intentionally out of scope for this docs site. The point of the public docs is to help users self-host and contributors get productive; release engineering is internal.

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Reporting issues

github.com/privacykey/privacytracker/issues. Bug reports use the bug_report.yml template; security reports follow SECURITY.md.