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Getting stated with modoboa Discover how to develop and extend modoboa
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keywords modoboa, getting started, backend, frontend, docker

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

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