Interested in making GrowthBook better? So are we! This guide should help get you setup with a local development environment so you can make changes, create PRs, and get your code merged.
If you just want to contribute a client library in a new language and not make changes to the app itself, you can skip the instructions here and view https://docs.growthbook.io/lib/build-your-own instead.
- MacOS or Linux (Windows may work too, but we haven't tested it)
- NodeJS 12.x or 14.x
- Check version by running
node -v
on terminal
- Check version by running
- Yarn
- Python 3.6+ (for the stats engine)
- Docker (for running MongoDB locally)
One sure shot way to run GrowthBook on Windows is through installing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). These are some of the steps to follow, also outlined in the link above:
- Search for your terminal app in the windows search bar
- Select the option to "Run as administrator"
- Now, on the terminal, run
wsl --install
- After the installation is complete, restart your computer
- Set up your Linux username and password
- Run
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
(for Ubuntu or Desbian) to update and upgrade packages
Now you have the basic Linux system set up, and can follow along with all the other steps
- Fork the project
- Clone your forked project by running
git clone [email protected]:{ YOUR_USERNAME }/growthbook.git
- Can also use
git clone
and list the HTTPS URL of the repo afterwards
- Can also use
- Run
cd growthbook
- Run
yarn
to install dependencies - Install poetry
- Run
curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 -
- Install the lastest version of the python virutal environment
sudo apt install python<version #>-venv
- Add poetry's path to your shell config file (~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, etc)
export PATH="<the path>:$PATH"
for help - Run
poetry -v
to confirm a successful install
- Run
- Run
yarn setup
to do the initial build - If you have Docker installed, start MongoDB in Docker:
docker run -d -p 27017:27017 --name mongo \
-e MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_USERNAME=root \
-e MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_PASSWORD=password \
mongo
If docker isn't running, view this. Look at this for other docker issues with Linux
Otherwise, install Mongo directly (no Docker)
- Run
yarn dev
to start the app in dev mode - Visit http://localhost:3000 in your browser and verify the app is working correctly
If you need to change any of the default configuration settings, you can use environment variables:
- Back-end:
cp packages/back-end/.env.example packages/back-end/.env.local
- Front-end:
cp packages/front-end/.env.example packages/front-end/.env.local
Then, edit the .env.local
files as needed.
This repository is a monorepo with the following packages:
- packages/front-end is a Next.js app and contains the full UI of the GrowthBook app.
- packages/back-end is an Express app and serves as the REST api for the front-end.
- packages/docs is another Next.js app of our documentation site (https://docs.growthbook.io).
- packages/sdk-js is our javascript SDK (
@growthbook/growthbook
on npm) - packages/sdk-react is our React SDK (
@growthbook/growthbook-react
on npm) - packages/stats is our Python stats engine (
gbstats
on PyPi)
Depending on what you're changing, you may need to edit one or more of these packages.
The yarn dev
command starts both the front-end and back-end in parallel.
The back-end can take up to 30 seconds for the initial build, so be patient.
The packages are available at the following urls with hot-reloading:
- Front-end: http://localhost:3000
- Back-end: http://localhost:3100
To start the docs site, run yarn workspace docs dev
. You can view the site at http://localhost:3200
To work on the SDKs, cd
into the desired directory and the following commands are available:
yarn test
- Run justyarn build
- Run the rollup build processyarn size
- Get the gzip size of the bundle (must runyarn build
first)
To work on the Python stats engine, cd
into the packages/stats
directory and the following commands are available:
yarn test
- Run pytestyarn lint
- Run flake8 and blackpoetry build
- Run the build process
There are a few repo-wide code quality tools:
yarn test
- Run the full test suite on all packagesyarn type-check
- Typescript type checkingyarn lint
- Typescript code lintingyarn workspace stats lint
- Python code linting (need topip install flake8 black
first)
There is a pre-commit hook that runs yarn lint
automatically, so you shouldn't need to run that yourself.
-
Please Provide a thoughtful commit message and push your changes to your fork using
git push origin main
(assuming your forked project is usingorigin
for the remote name and you are on themain
branch). -
Open a Pull Request on GitHub with a description of your changes.
Join our Slack community if you need help getting set up or want to chat. We're also happy to hop on a call and do some pair programming.