grafana/docs/sources/project/building_from_source.md

page_title	page_description	page_keywords
Building from source	Building from source Grafana.	grafana, build, contribute, documentation

Building Grafana from source

This guide will help you create packages from source and get grafana up and running in dev environment. Grafana ships with its own required backend server; also completely open-source. It's written in Go and has a full HTTP API.

Dependencies

• Go 1.4
• NodeJS

Get Code

Create a directory for the project and set your path accordingly. Then download and install Grafana into your $GOPATH directory

export GOPATH=`pwd`
go get github.com/grafana/grafana

Building the backend

cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/grafana/grafana
go run build.go setup              # (only needed once to install godep)
$GOPATH/bin/godep restore          # (will pull down all golang lib dependencies in your current GOPATH)
go run build.go build              # (or 'go build .')

Building on Windows

The Grafana backend includes Sqlite3 which requires GCC to compile. So in order to compile Grafana on windows you need to install GCC. We recommend TDM-GCC.

Build the Front-end Assets

To build less to css for the frontend you will need a recent version of of node (v0.12.0), npm (v2.5.0) and grunt (v0.4.5). Run the following:

npm install
npm install -g grunt-cli
grunt

Recompile backend on source change

To rebuild on source change (requires that you executed godep restore)

go get github.com/Unknwon/bra
bra run

Running Grafana Locally

You can run a local instance of Grafana by running:

./bin/grafana-server 

If you built the binary with go run build.go build, run ./bin/grafana-server

If you built it with go build ., run ./grafana

Open grafana in your browser (default http://localhost:3000) and login with admin user (default user/pass = admin/admin).

Developing for Grafana

To add features, customize your config, etc, you'll need to rebuild on source change (requires that you executed godep restore, as outlined above).

go get github.com/Unknwon/bra
bra run

You'll also need to run grunt watch to watch for changes to the front-end.

Creating optimized release packages

This step builds linux packages and requires that fpm is installed. Install fpm via gem install fpm.

go run build.go build package

Dev config

Create a custom.ini in the conf directory to override default configuration options. You only need to add the options you want to override. Config files are applied in the order of:

1. grafana.ini
2. custom.ini

Learn more about Grafana config options in the Configuration section

Create a pull requests

Please contribute to the Grafana project and submit a pull request! Build new features, write or update documentation, fix bugs and generally make Grafana even more awesome.

Before or after you create a pull request, sign the contributor license agreement. Together we can build amazing software faster.