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Set up your development environment

Set up your development environment for building, running, and testing Mattermost.

Prerequisites for WSL Development Environment 

1. Install WSL by running the following command as an administrator in PowerShell: wsl --install
2. Install Docker Desktop for Windows on your Windows machine. Alternatively, you can also install docker engine directly on your linux distribution.
3. Perform the rest of the operations (except Docker installation) within the WSL environment and not in Windows.

Setup the Mattermost Server 

1. Install make.

   • On Ubuntu, you can install build essential tools which will also take care of installing the make:

   sudo apt install build-essential
   

2. Install Docker.

3. Install Go.

4. Increase the number of available file descriptors. Update your shell’s initialization script (e.g. .bashrc or .zshrc), and add the following:

   ulimit -n 8096
   

5. If you don’t have it already, install libpng with your preferred package manager.

   • If you are on ARM based Mac, you’ll need to install Rosetta to make libpng work. Rosetta can be installed by the following command-

     softwareupdate --install-rosetta
     

6. Fork https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost.

7. Clone the Mattermost source code from your fork:

   git clone https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/mattermost.git
   

8. Install NVM and use it to install the required version of Node.js:

   • First, install NVM by following these instructions.

   • Then, use NVM to install the correct version of Node.js for the Mattermost web app (this should be run within the webapp directory):

     nvm install
     

9. Start the server:

   cd server
   make run-server
   

10. Test your environment:

    curl http://localhost:8065/api/v4/system/ping
    

    If successful, the curl step will return a JSON object:

    {"AndroidLatestVersion":"","AndroidMinVersion":"","DesktopLatestVersion":"","DesktopMinVersion":"","IosLatestVersion":"","IosMinVersion":"","status":"OK"}
    

11. Run the webapp and watch:

    make run
    

12. Stop the server:

    make stop-server
    

    The stop-server make target does not stop all the docker containers started by run-server. To stop the running docker containers:

    make stop-docker
    

13. Set your options:

    Some behaviors can be customized such as running the server in the foreground as described in the config.mk file in the server directory. See that file for details.