grafana/contribute/development.md

Develop Grafana

This guide helps you get started developing Grafana.

Dependencies

Make sure you have the following dependencies installed before moving on to set up your developer environment:

• Git
• Go
• Node.js (Long Term Support)
• Yarn

macOS

We recommend using Homebrew for installing any missing dependencies:

brew install git
brew install go
brew install node

npm install -g yarn

Download Grafana

We recommend using Go to download the source code for the Grafana project:

1. Add export GOPATH=$HOME/go/ to the bottom of your $HOME/.bash_profile.
2. Open a terminal and run go get github.com/grafana/ in your terminal. This command downloads, and installs Grafana to your $GOPATH.
3. Open $GOPATH/src/github.com/grafana/grafana in your favorite code editor.

Build Grafana

Grafana consists of two components; the frontend, and the backend.

Frontend

Before we can build the frontend assets, we need to install the dependencies:

yarn install --pure-lockfile

After the command has finished, we can start building our source code:

yarn start

Once yarn start has built the assets it will continue to do so whenever any of the files change. This means you don't have to manually build the assets whenever you've made a change to the code.

Next, we'll build the web server that will serve the frontend assets we just built.

Backend

Build and run the backend, by running make run in the root directory of the repository. This command will compile the Go source code, and start a web server.

By default, you can access the web server at http://localhost:3000/.

Log in using the default credentials:

username	password
admin	admin

When you log in for the first time, Grafana will ask you to change your password.

Test Grafana

We use jest for our frontend tests. Run them using yarn:

yarn jest

If you're developing for the backend, run the tests with the standard Go tool:

go test -v ./pkg/...

Add data sources

By now, you should be able to build and test a change you've made to the Grafana source code. In most cases, you need to add at least one data source to verify the change.

To set up data sources for your development environment, go to the devenv directory in the Grafana repository:

cd devenv

Run the setup.sh script to setup a set of data sources and dashboards in your local Grafana. The script creates a set of data sources called gdev-<type>, and a set of dashboards located in a folder called gdev dashboards.

Some of the data sources require databases to run in the background.

Installing and configuring databases can be a tricky business. Grafana uses Docker to make the task of setting up databases a little easier. Make sure you install Docker before proceeding to the next step.

In the root directory of your Grafana repository, run the following command:

make devenv sources=influxdb,loki

The script generates a Docker Compose file with the databases you specify as sources, and runs them in the background.

See the repository for all the available data sources. Note that some data sources have specific Docker images for macOS, e.g. prometheus_mac.

Learn more

• Read our style guides.
• Learn how to Create a pull request.
• Read How to contribute to Grafana as a junior dev by Ivana Huckova.