Lumiana — experimenting with Node.js APIs alongside a Solid UI

[zohayrslileh]

Hi! I've been working on Lumiana, an experiment for building personal apps with Vite. I wanted to write an app's UI and logic together without building a separate API just to connect them.

You connect to a Node server with credentials first, then use Node imports alongside your UI code. JavaScript stays in the browser where possible; operations that need files, processes, sockets, or native code run on the server.

The goal is to use existing Node libraries without changing them or writing compatibility code for each package. I've had examples running with Express, Hono, Elysia, Sharp, node-pty, and sqlite3, but it's still very experimental. Most libraries I've tried don't work normally yet.

There's a small Solid example in the repo. It connects first, imports Node's OS module, and displays the hostname in a component. It's a basic example of the idea, not a finished personal app.

Project and setup instructions