Useful tips

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.

Prepare a virtual environment

A virtual environment is a good way to setup a development environment on your machine.

Note

virtualenv is available on all major distributions, just install it using your favorite packages manager.

To do so, run the following commands:

$ virtualenv <path>
$ source <path>/bin/activate
$ git clone https://github.com/tonioo/modoboa.git
$ cd modoboa
$ python setup.py develop

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.

Deploy an instance for development

Warning

Make sure to create a database before running this step.

Now that you have a running environment, you’re ready to deploy a test instance:

$ modoboa-admin.py deploy --devel --dburl <database url> <path>
$ cd <path>
$ python manage.py runserver

You’re ready to go!

Manage static files

Modoboa uses bower (thanks to django-bower) to manage its CSS and javascript dependencies.

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.

Test your modifications

If you deployed a specific instance for your development needs, you can run the tests suite as follows:

> python manage.py test modoboa.core modoboa.lib modoboa.admin modoboa.limits modoboa.relaydomains

Otherwise, you can run the tests suite from the repository using tox.

Start a basic Modoboa instance

From the repository, run the following command to launch a simple instance with a few fixtures:

> tox -e serve

You can use admin/password to log in.

Build the documentation

If you need to modify the documenation and want to see the result, you can build it as follows:

> tox -e doc
> firefox .tox/doc/tmp/html/index.html

FAQ

bower command is missing in manage.py

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