Server Workflow

If you haven’t set up your developer environment, please do so before continuing with this section.

Join the Developers community channel to ask questions from community members and the Mattermost core team.

Workflow 

Here’s a general workflow a Mattermost developer working on the mattermost-server repository:

1. Review the repository structure to familiarize yourself with the project
   • ./api4/ holds all API and application related code
   • ./model/ holds all data model definitions and the Go driver
   • ./store/ holds all database querying code
   • ./utils/ holds all utilities, such as the mail utility
   • ./i18n/ holds all localization files for the server
2. On your fork, create a branch MM-#### where #### is the ticket number if it is a Jira ticket, or GH-#### if it is a GitHub Issue without a Jira ticket.
3. Make the code changes required to complete your ticket, making sure to write or modify unit tests where appropriate. Make sure to use testify for new tests.
4. To test your changes, run make run-server from the root directory of the server respository. This will start up the server at http://localhost:8065. To get changes to the server it must be restarted with make restart-server. If you want to test with the web app, you may also run make run which will start the server and a watcher for changes to the web app.
5. Once everything works to meet the ticket requirements, stop Mattermost by running make stop in the server repository, then run make check-style to check your syntax and make test to run the tests.
6. Commit your changes, push your branch and create a pull request.
7. Respond to feedback on your pull request and make changes as necessary by commiting to your branch and pushing it. You might need to rebase your changes if another pull request creates conflicts.
8. That’s it! Rejoice that you’ve helped make Mattermost better.

Useful server Makefile commands 

Some useful make commands:

• make run will run the server, symlink your mattermost-webapp folder and start a watcher for the web app
• make stop stops the server and the web app watcher
• make run-server will run only the server and not the client
• make debug-server will run the server in the delve debugger
• make stop-server stops only the server
• make clean-docker stops and removes your Docker images and is a good way to wipe your database
• make clean cleans your local environment of temporary files
• make nuke wipes your local environment back to a completely fresh start
• make package creates packages for distributing your builds and puts them in the ~/go/src/github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/dist directory. First you will need to run make build and make build-client.
• make megacheck runs the tool megacheck against the code base to find potential issues in the code. Please note the results are guidelines, and not mandatory in all cases. If in doubt, ask in the Developers community channel.

Running only specific server unit tests 

Since running every single unit test takes a lot of time while making changes, you can run a subset of the serverside unit tests by using the following:

go test -v -run='<test name or regex>' ./<package containing test>

For example, if you wanted to run TestPostUpdate in api/post_test.go, you would run the following:

go test -v -run='TestPostUpdate' ./api

Useful mattermost commands 

During development you may want to reset the database and generate random data for testing your changes. For this purpose, Mattermost has the following commands in the mattermost CLI:

Install the server with go install ./cmd/mattermost in the server repository.

You can reset your database to the initial state using:

mattermost reset

After that, you can generate random data to populate the Mattermost database using:

mattermost sampledata

You can create an account using the following command:

mattermost user create --email user@example.com --username test1 --password mypassword

Optionally, you can make that account a System Admin with the following command:

mattermost user create --email user@example.com --username test1 --password mypassword --system_admin

Testing email notifications 

When Docker starts, the SMTP server is available on port 2500. Username and password are not required.

You can access Inbucket webmail on port 9000.

For additional information on configuring an SMTP email server, including troubleshooting steps, see https://docs.mattermost.com/install/smtp-email-setup.html.

Testing with GitLab Omnibus 

To test a locally compiled version of Mattermost with GitLab Omnibus, replace the following GitLab files:

• The compiled mattermost binary in /opt/gitlab/embedded/bin/mattermost
• The assets (templates, i18n, fonts, webapp) in /opt/gitlab/embedded/service/mattermost