modoboa/doc-ng/contributing/getting_start.md

Getting started

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.

With Docker

A docker image is available for developers.

To use it, you must install docker and docker-compose

• docker and
• docker-compose first.

If not already done, clone the repo and open it:

$ git clone https://github.com/modoboa/modoboa.git
$ cd modoboa

Then, just run the following command:

$ docker-compose up

Then if not done already, run this command to create an OIDC application in order to be able to log in from the frontend:

$ docker exec modoboa-api '/bin/sh -c python3 /code/test_project/manage.py createapplication --name frontend --client-id "LVQbfIIX3khWR3nDvix1u9yEGHZUxcx53bhJ7FlD" --user 1 --algorithm RS256 --redirect-uris 'https://localhost:3000/login/logged' public authorization-code'
$ docker exec modoboa-api '/bin/sh -c python3 /code/test_project/manage.py createapplication --name Dovecot --skip-authorization --client-id=dovecot --client-secret=Toto12345 confidential client-credentials'

It will start the docker environment and make a Modoboa instance available at https://localhost:8000 and the new admin interface at https://localhost:3000.

If you don't want to use docker or need a more complex development setup, go to the next section.

Without Docker

Prepare a virtual environment

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
$ pip install -e .[dev]

This will create a symbolic link to your local copy so any modification you make will be automatically available in your environment, no need to copy them.

Deploy an instance for development

::: 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.

Frontend

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/{.interpreted-text role="file"} 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

Tests

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

Documentation

The source files are located in the /doc-ng/[ folder and are written in markdown.

They are formatted in HTML and compiled thanks to VitePress

To build it and see the result, run:

$ npm run dev