After forking and cloning the repo, you should save two .env files in the repo.
First, in /dashboard/.env:
NODE_ENV=development
API_SERVER=localhost:8080
Next, in /docker/.env:
SERVER_URL=http://localhost:8080
SERVER_PORT=8080
DB_HOST=postgres
DB_PORT=5432
DB_USER=porter
DB_PASS=porter
DB_NAME=porter
SQL_LITE=false
Once you've done this, go to the root repository, and run docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yaml up. You should see postgres, webpack, and porter containers spin up. When the webpack and porter containers have finished compiling and have spun up successfully (this will take 5-10 minutes after the containers start), you can navigate to localhost:8080 and you should be greeted with the "Log In" screen. Create a user by entering an email/password on the "Register" screen.
At this point, you can make a change to any .go file to trigger a backend rebuild, and any file in /dashboard/src to trigger a hot reload.
While docker is an awesome way of getting started as it simulates the real environment that we use on our hosted dashboard, for some people this may bee too much.
In order to decrease the complexity of all the environment, you can just run the development environment locally without docker.
To do so you should follow the next steps:
1- First, inside the folder where you cloned the repo (e.g: /home/user/porter) run make setup. This should download all the modules for go to work and install all the dependencies that the frontend needs to work!
2- After installing everything you should update the env variables:
The /dashboard/.env should look like this:
NODE_ENV=development
DEV_SERVER_PORT=8081 # Tell the webpack dev server in wich port we wanna run, it defaults to 8080 but we have to be carefull this is not the same port as the backend
ENABLE_PROXY=true # Usually we would use nginx, but for this environment we're going to enable webpack-dev-server proxy
API_SERVER=http://localhost:8080 # API server url, this url will be used for the proxy to redirect all /api calls
And the /docker/.env variables should look like this:
SERVER_URL=http://localhost:8080
SERVER_PORT=8080
SQL_LITE=true
SQL_LITE_PATH=./porter.db
REDIS_ENABLED=false
In this case SQLLite is the simplest solution for getting the environment running, but you can enable postgres or redis if you want!
3- Open two terminals and run make run-server and in the second one make run-frontend. This should get everything up and running!
This environment is experimental, if you run into any issue don't doubt in contact us through our discord!
You can get psql access by running the following:
psql --host localhost --port 5400 --username porter --dbname porter -W
This will prompt you for a password. Enter porter, and you should see the psql shell!
If you are getting blocked out of the dashboard because your email is not verified (fixed in v0.6.2 of Porter, so make sure you've pulled from master recently), you can update your email in the database to `verified":
UPDATE users SET email_verified='t' WHERE id=1;
These steps will help you get set up with a minikube cluster that can be used for development. Prerequisities:
kubectl installed locallyFollowing the OS-specific steps to get minikube running:
If you now navigate to http://localhost:8080, you should see the minikube cluster attached! There will be some limitations:
Install minikube, and install the hyperkit driver. The easiest way to do this is via:
brew install minikube
brew install hyperkit
Start minikube with the hyperkit driver:
minikube start --driver hyperkit
Make sure that you've downloaded the latest version of the Porter CLI, and that your development version of Porter is running. Then run:
porter config set-host http://localhost:8080
porter auth login
Make sure that minikube is selected as the current context (kubectl config current-context), and then run:
porter connect kubeconfig
Follow the steps to install WSL on Windows here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10
sudo apt install xdg-utils
sudo apt install postgresql
Once WSL is installed, head to docker and enable WSL Integration.

Next, continue with the Getting Started Section
Sometimes, it may be necessary to serve securely over https://localhost (for example, required by Slack integrations). Run the following command from the repository root:
openssl req -x509 -out ./docker/localhost.crt -keyout ./docker/localhost.key \
-newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -sha256 \
-subj '/CN=localhost' -extensions EXT -config <( \
printf "[dn]\nCN=localhost\n[req]\ndistinguished_name = dn\n[EXT]\nsubjectAltName=DNS:localhost\nkeyUsage=digitalSignature\nextendedKeyUsage=serverAuth")
Update ./docker/.env with the following:
SERVER_URL=https://localhost
If using Chrome, paste the following into the Chrome address bar:
chrome://flags/#allow-insecure-localhost
And then Enable the Allow invalid certificates for resources loaded from localhost field.
Finally, run docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev-secure.yaml up instead of the standard docker-compose file.