grafana/docs/sources/project/building_from_source.md

+++ title = "Building from source" type = "docs" [menu.docs] parent = "installation" weight = 5 +++

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 1.7.3
• 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
go run build.go build              # (or 'go build ./pkg/cmd/grafana-server')

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 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

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.

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.