---
title: Developing
permalink: /v5/developing/
---

Running Coral for development is very similar to installing Coral via Source as
described above.

Coral requires NodeJS >=10, we recommend using `nvm` to help manage node
versions: https://github.com/creationix/nvm.

```bash
# Clone and cd into the Coral directory.
git clone https://github.com/coralproject/talk.git
cd talk

# Install dependencies.
npm install
```

Running Coral with default settings assumes that you have:

- MongoDB >=4.2 running on `127.0.0.1:27017`
- Redis >=3.2 running on `127.0.0.1:6379`

If you don't already have these databases running, you can execute the following
assuming you have Docker installed on your local machine:

```bash
docker run -d -p 27017:27017 --restart always --name mongo mongo:4.2
docker run -d -p 6379:6379 --restart always --name redis redis:3.2
```

We recommend installing [watchman](https://facebook.github.io/watchman/docs/install.html) for better watch
performance.

```bash
# On macOS, you can run the following with Homebrew.
brew update
brew install watchman
```

Then start Coral with:

```bash
# Run the server in development mode in order to facilitate auto-restarting and
# rebuilding when file changes are detected. This might take a while to fully run.
npm run watch
```

When the client code has been built, navigate to http://localhost:8080/install
to start the installation wizard. **Note: Ensure `localhost:8080` is used in the permitted domains list.**

To see the comment stream goto http://localhost:8080/.

To run linting and tests use the following commands:

```bash
# Run the linters.
npm run lint

# Run our unit and integration tests.
npm run test
```

## Email

To test out the email sending functionality, you can run [inbucket](https://www.inbucket.org/)
which provides a test SMTP server that can visualize emails in the browser:

```bash
docker run -d --name inbucket --restart always -p 2500:2500 -p 9000:9000 inbucket/inbucket
```

You can then configure the email server on Coral
by setting the email settings in
`Configure -> Email` in the admin:

| Field          | Value                |
| -------------- | -------------------- |
| From Address   | `community@test.com` |
| Secure         | `No`                 |
| Host           | `localhost`          |
| Port           | `2500`               |
| Authentication | `No`                 |

Navigate to http://localhost:9000, click the "Monitor" tab. New emails received
on this screen.

## Design Language System (UI Components)

We use [docz](https://docz.site) to document and develop our Design Language System. To start docz run:

```bash
# Make sure CSS types are generated.
# This is not required when `npm run watch` is already running.
npm run generate:css-types

# Run docz in development.
npm run docz -- dev
```

After compilation has finished you can access docz at http://localhost:3030/.