You would like to work on Modoboa but you don't know where to start? You're at the right place! Browse this page to learn useful tips.
A docker image is available for developers. To use it, you must install docker and docker-compose first.
Then, just run the following command:
$ docker-compose up
It will start the docker environment and make a Modoboa instance available at http://localhost:8000
.
If you don't want to use docker or need a more complex development setup, go to the next section.
A virtual environment is a good way to setup a development environment on your machine.
To do so, run the following commands:
$ python3 -m venv <path>
$ source <path>/bin/activate
$ git clone https://github.com/modoboa/modoboa.git
$ cd modoboa
$ python setup.py develop
$ pip install -r dev-requirements.txt
The develop
command creates a symbolic link to your local copy so any modification you make will be automatically available in your environment, no need to copy them.
Warning
Make sure to create a database <database>
before running this step. The format of the database url is also described in this page.
Now that you have setup a development environment, you can deploy a test instance and run it:
$ cd <path>
$ modoboa-admin.py deploy --dburl default:<database url> --domain localhost --devel instance
$ python manage.py runserver
You're ready to go! You should be able to access Modoboa at http://localhost:8000
using admin:password
as credentials.
The Django templates and views are used to render this interface, which is served by the uWSGI application - or the local server in development. bower is used to manage the CSS and JavaScript dependencies - i.e. Boostrap, jQuery - thanks to django-bower.
Those dependencies are listed in a file called dev_settings.py
located inside the <path_to_local_copy>/modoboa/core
directory.
If you want to add a new dependency, just complete the BOWER_INSTALLED_APPS
parameter and run the following command:
$ python manage.py bower install
It will download and store the required files into the <path_to_local_copy>/modoboa/bower_components
directory.
The 2.0 version of Modoboa introduces a completely new interface written with the Vue.js framework. The source files are located in the frontend/
directory.
To set it up, you will need to install NodeJS and Yarn - to manage the dependencies. Then, navigate to the frontend/
directory and run:
$ yarn install
You can now build it and serve it - while running your instance too to serve the API - with:
$ yarn serve
If you deployed an instance for development, you can launch the tests from it with:
$ python manage.py test modoboa
You could also test just some them, i.e.:
$ python manage.py test modoboa.core.tests.test_authentication
Alternatively, you can use tox from the repository to run all the tests and check the coverage with:
$ tox
You could limit the environment to a specific Python version with the -e py<version>
argument.
Note that it is also possible to quickly run a test instance without any deployment - e.g. to preview some changes - by running:
$ tox -e serve
The source files are located in the file:`doc/ folder and are written in reStructuredText (reST). They are formatted in HTML and compiled thanks to `Sphinx <https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/>_.
To build it and see the result, run:
$ tox -e doc
$ open .tox/doc/tmp/html/index.html
bower command is missing in manage.py if you don't use the --devel
option of the modoboa-admin.py deploy
command.
To fix it, regenerate your instance or update your settings.py
file manually. Look at devmode
in https://github.com/tonioo/modoboa/blob/master/modoboa/core/commands/templates/settings.py.tpl