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Running Client Codebase

Appsmith's client (UI/frontend) uses the ReactJS library and Typescript. The application also uses libraries like react-redux and redux-saga for workflows. We use VS Code Editor as our primary editor.

How to Setup Appsmith for Client Side Development

Pre-requisites:

On your development machine, please ensure that:

  1. You have docker installed in your system. If not, please visit: https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/
  2. You have mkcert installed. Please visit: https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert#installation for details. For mkcert to work with Firefox, you may need to install the nss utility. Details are in the link above.

Note:

  • On Linux, you can easily install mkcert using the following command
curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/FiloSottile/mkcert/releases/latest \
| grep "browser_download_url.*linux-amd64" \
| cut -d : -f 2,3 | tr -d \" \
| wget -i - -O mkcert
chmod +x  mkcert
sudo mv mkcert /usr/local/bin
  1. You have envsubst installed. Use brew install gettext on MacOS. Linux machines usually have this installed.
  2. You have cloned the repo in your local machine.
  3. You have yarn installed as a global npm package, i.e. npm install -g yarn.

Create local HTTPS certificates:

  1. Run the following command from the project root.

    cd app/client/docker && mkcert -install && mkcert "*.appsmith.com" && cd ../../..

    This command will create 2 files in the docker/ directory:

    • _wildcard.appsmith.com-key.pem
    • _wildcard.appsmith.com.pem

  2. Add the domain dev.appsmith.com to /etc/hosts.

    echo "127.0.0.1 dev.appsmith.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

    Note:

    • Please be careful when copying the above string as space between the IP and the string goes missing sometimes.
    • Please check that the string is copied properly
    cat /etc/hosts | grep appsmith

  3. Run cmd: cp .env.example .env

  4. Run the script start-https.sh to start the Nginx container that will proxy the frontend code on your local system.

    cd app/client
./start-https.sh https://release.app.appsmith.com

Steps to build & run the code:

  1. Run yarn install.

    Note:

    • On the Ubuntu Linux platform, please run the following cmd before step 2 below:

      echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p

  2. Run yarn start.

    🎉 Your Appsmith client is now running on https://dev.appsmith.com.

    This URL must be opened with https and not have port 3000 in it.

Note:

  • By default, your client app points to the local API server - http://host.docker.internal:8080 for MacOS or http://localhost:8080 for Linux. If you don't have the API server running on your local system, your page will load with errors. To set up the API server on your local system, please follow the instructions here
  • If you cannot set up the API server on your local system, you can also use Appsmith's staging API server.

If yarn start throws mismatch node version error

This error occurs because the node version is not compatible with the app environment. In this case, Node version manager can be used, allowing multiple node versions in different projects. Check below for installation and usage details:

  1. Install a node version manager. For eg: check nvm or fnm.
  2. In the project's root, run nvm use 16.14.0 or fnm use 16.14.0.

If you would like to hit a different Appsmith server:

  • You can pass the server URL as an arg to the start-https.sh script.

    ./start-https.sh https://release.app.appsmith.com

  • Run

    yarn
yarn start

Running Tests on Client

  1. To run the Cypress integration tests, you can create a local file app/client/cypress.env.json to populate USERNAME and PASSWORD env variables or use one of the methods from their docs.

    {
  "USERNAME": "Enter username",
  "PASSWORD": "Enter password"
}

  2. run:

  cd app/client
  yarn run test

Please check out our Testing Contribution guide for more details on setting up & troubleshooting Cypress runs on your machine.

  1. To run the Jest unit tests, run:
  cd app/client
  yarn run test:unit

Windows WSL2 Setup

How to Setup Appsmith for Client Side Development in Windows

Before you follow the instructions above, make sure to check the following steps:

  1. You have WSL2 setup in your machine. If not, please visit: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10.
  2. You have Node.js installed on the WSL Distro.
  3. You have Docker Desktop installed with the WSL2 backend. If not, please visit: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/wsl/.

In the above Docker Desktop Setup instructions, make sure to:

  1. Set WSL Distro to run in WSL2 mode.
  2. Enable integration with the WSL Distro in Docker Desktop.
  3. Install Remote-WSL extension in VSCode.

Make sure to Clone the Repo in the WSL file system instead of the Windows file system.

And finally, you can open the folder in VSCode with WSL by following the instructions in Docker Desktop Setup, or by,

  1. Clicking on the Green button on the Bottom Left corner in VSCode.
  2. Selecting Open Folder in WSL and navigating to the folder in WSL.

After this, you can continue Setting up from here.

Troubleshooting

I am on WSL and can't reach dev.appsmith.com

  • You will need to add dev.appsmith.com to Windows' C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts instead of /etc/hosts. Alternately, you can install a desktop environment in WSL to open dev.appsmith.com from a browser in WSL.

    127.0.0.1 dev.appsmith.com

  • WSL network with windows can be brittle; make sure you can reach http://127.0.0.1:3000 from windows. If not, restarting wsl usually resolves the issue.

Docker container doesn't work

  • You can check logs with docker logs wildcard-nginx.

  • If you see Address already in use errors, look for the service running on port 80 and 443 with lsof -i tcp:80,443 | grep LISTEN and stop the process.

    Example: Some Linux distros have apache2 listening on 80. Stop them with sudo systemctl stop apache2

I want to add dev.appsmith.com conf to my local Nginx without Docker.

  1. Copy app/client/docker/templates/nginx-app.conf.template over to your nginx sites directory.
  2. You can remove or replace values for all the sub_filter. None of those properties are required.
  3. Change proxy_pass value for client from __APPSMITH_CLIENT_PROXY_PASS__ to http://localhost:3000
  4. Replace all occurrences of __APPSMITH_SERVER_PROXY_PASS__ with http://localhost:8080 (or the server you want to point to)
  5. Generate the certificates manually via mkcert.
  6. Change the value of the certificate location for keys ssl_certificate & ssl_certificate_key to the place where these certificates were generated.
  7. Reload nginx! 🎉

I still need help!

Please open a Github issue or join our discord server.