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Development Setup

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Alex Reichert edited this page Mar 16, 2021 · 7 revisions

Papercups runs on Elixir/Phoenix, with a TypeScript React app for the frontend.

Setup with asdf (recommended)

First, you'll need to install the following:

Once that's all set, clone the repo:

git clone git@github.com:papercups-io/papercups.git
cd papercups

And install all our dependencies:

asdf install
mix local.hex
mix deps.get
npm install --prefix=assets # cd assets && npm install
mix ecto.setup
mix phx.server # or `iex -S mix phx.server` for interactive mode

Manual setup (if asdf isn't working)

If you haven't installed Elixir, Phoenix, NodeJS, and PostgresQL yet, you can find some great instructions here: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/installation.html

tl;dr:

mix local.hex
  • To check that we are on Elixir 1.6 and Erlang 20 or later, run:
elixir -v
Erlang/OTP 20 [erts-9.3] [source] [64-bit] [smp:8:8] [async-threads:10] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false] [dtrace]

Elixir 1.6.3
  • Install the Phoenix application generator:
mix archive.install hex phx_new 1.5.4

Cloning the repo

git clone git@github.com:papercups-io/papercups.git
cd papercups

To start your server

  • Install backend dependencies with mix deps.get
  • Install frontend dependencies with npm install --prefix=assets (or cd assets && npm install)
  • Create and migrate your database with mix ecto.setup
  • Start the server with mix phx.server (or iex -S mix phx.server for interactive mode)

This will automatically start up the React frontend in watch mode on localhost:3000, with the API running on localhost:4000.

Frontend development

The frontend code will start up automatically when you run mix phx.server, but for more information see: assets/README.md

Developing on Docker

You can edit your local code when developing with docker and it will update in the container.

The docker file is made for development only at the moment

docker build -t papercups . && docker-compose up

Running tests

Create a PostgreSQL test database named: chat_api_test, and run:

mix test

Setting up email alerts

Set the environment variables in the .env.example file.

At the moment we only support Mailgun — other messaging channels are coming soon!

Deploying

We currently use Heroku for deployments. (This is for internal use only.)

git push heroku master
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