OpenProject development setup on macOS

To develop OpenProject a setup similar to that for using OpenProject in production is needed.

This guide assumes that you have a macOS installation with administrative rights. OpenProject will be installed with a PostgreSQL database.

Please note: This guide is NOT suitable for a production setup, but only for developing with it!

If you find any bugs or you have any recommendations for improving this tutorial, please, feel free to send a pull request or comment in the OpenProject forums.

Prepare your environment

We’ll use homebrew to install most of our requirements. Please install that first using the guide on their homepage.

Install Ruby

Use rbenv and ruby-build to install Ruby. We always require the latest ruby versions, and you can check which version is required by checking the Gemfile for the ruby "~> X.Y" statement. At the time of writing, this version is “3.3.4”

Install rbenv and ruby-build

rbenv is a ruby version manager that lets you quickly switch between ruby versions. ruby-build is an addon to rbenv that installs ruby versions.

# Install
$ brew install rbenv ruby-build
# Initialize rbenv
$ rbenv init

Installing ruby

With both installed, we can now install the actual ruby version. You can check available ruby versions with rbenv install --list.

We suggest you install the version we require in .ruby-version. Read the first line e.g. 3.3.4 and install that version.

# Install the required version as read from the .ruby-version file
rbenv install 3.3.4

This might take a while depending on whether ruby is built from source. After it is complete, you need to tell rbenv to globally activate this version

rbenv global 3.3.4

You also need to install bundler, the ruby gem bundler.

gem install bundler

Setup PostgreSQL database

Next, install a PostgreSQL database. If you wish to use a MySQL database instead and have installed one, skip these steps.

# Install postgres database
$ brew install postgresql

# Confirm that postgres has created a default database cluster if you see
This formula has created a default database cluster with:
  initdb --locale=C -E UTF-8 /opt/homebrew/var/postgresql@14 # /usr/local for Intel Macs

Then, create the OpenProject database user and accompanied database.

createuser -d -P openproject

You will be prompted for a password, for the remainder of these instructions, we assume its openproject-dev-password.

Now, create the database openproject_dev and openproject_test owned by the previously created user.

createdb -O openproject openproject_dev
createdb -O openproject openproject_test

Install Node.js

We will install the latest LTS version of Node.js via nodenv. This is basically the same steps as for rbenv:

Install nodenv and node-build

# Install
brew install nodenv node-build
# Initialize nodenv
nodenv init

Install latest LTS node version

You can find the latest LTS version here: nodejs.org/en/download

At the time of writing this is v20.9.0. Install and activate it with:

nodenv install 20.9.0
nodenv global 20.9.0

Update NPM to the latest version

npm install npm@latest -g

Verify your installation

You should now have an active ruby and node installation. Verify that it works with these commands.

$ ruby --version
ruby 3.3.4 (2024-07-09 revision be1089c8ec) [arm64-darwin23]

$ bundler --version
Bundler version 2.5.13

node --version
v20.9.0

npm --version
10.5.0

Install OpenProject

# Download the repository
git clone https://github.com/opf/openproject.git
cd openproject

Note that we have checked out the dev branch of the OpenProject repository. Development in OpenProject happens in the dev branch (there is no master branch). So, if you want to develop a feature, create a feature branch from a current dev branch.

Configure OpenProject

Create and configure the database configuration file in config/database.yml (relative to the openproject-directory.

vim config/database.yml

Now edit the config/database.yml file and insert your database credentials. It should look like this (just with your database name, username, and password):

default: &default
  adapter: postgresql
  encoding: unicode
  # Socket encryption must be disabled on macOS. There is an old bug in which forked processes cause problems on a Mac.
  # TL;DR: set this flag, otherwise Ruby will crash whenever a route is accessed.
  # Visit https://github.com/ged/ruby-pg/issues/311 to enter the rabbit hole.
  gssencmode: disable
  host: localhost
  username: openproject
  password: openproject-dev-password

development:
  <<: *default
  database: openproject_dev

test:
  <<: *default
  database: openproject_test

To configure the environment variables such as the number of web server threads OPENPROJECT_WEB_WORKERS, copy the .env.example to .env and add the environment variables you want to configure. The variables will be automatically loaded to the application’s environment.

Tip

Instead of using the gssencmode flag in config/database.yml, you can add export PGGSSENCMODE="disable" to your Shell profile (~/.zprofile by default). This will prevent Ruby crashes for all of your projects.

Some users report Ruby crashes despite having set this flag to disable. If this is the case for you as well, try adding export OBJC_DISABLE_INITIALIZE_FORK_SAFETY=yes to your Shell profile.

Install other requirements

Some operations in OpenProject require additional software. These include PDF exports and interaction with an LDAP server.

In order to develop OpenProject in these areas, you need to install imagemagick and java.

brew install imagemagick java

As of writing, you need to manually create a symlink to OpenJDK for the Java installation to take effect. Homebrew will tell you how.

Finish the Installation of OpenProject

Install code dependencies, link plugin modules and export translation files.

• gem dependencies (If you get errors here, you’re likely missing a development dependency for your distribution)
• node_modules
• link plugin frontend modules
• and export frontend localization files

bin/setup_dev

Now, run the following tasks to migrate and seed the dev database, and prepare the test setup for running tests locally.

RAILS_ENV=development bin/rails db:seed

Run OpenProject through overmind

You can run all required workers of OpenProject through overmind, which combines them in a single tab. Optionally, you may also run overmind as a daemon and connect to services individually. The bin/dev command will first check if overmind is available and run the application via Procfile.dev. Otherwise it will use foreman if it is available.

bin/dev

The application will be available at http://127.0.0.1:3000. To customize bind address and port copy the .env.example provided in the root of this project as .env and configure values as required.

By default a worker process will also be started. In development asynchronous execution of long-running background tasks (sending emails, copying projects, etc.) may be of limited use and it has known issues with regards to memory (see background worker section below). To disable the worker process:

echo "OVERMIND_IGNORED_PROCESSES=worker" >> .overmind.env

For more information refer to the great Overmind documentation usage section.

You can access the application with the admin-account having the following credentials:

Username: admin
Password: admin

Run OpenProject manually

To run OpenProject manually, you need to run the rails server and the webpack frontend bundler to:

Rails web server

RAILS_ENV=development bin/rails server

This will start the development server on port 3000 by default.

Angular frontend

To run the frontend server, please run

RAILS_ENV=development npm run serve

This will watch for any changes within the frontend/ and compile the application javascript bundle on demand. You will need to watch this tab for the compilation output, should you be working on the TypeScript / Angular frontend part.

You can then access the application either through localhost:3000 (Rails server) or through the frontend proxied http://localhost:4200, which will provide hot reloading for changed frontend code.

Delayed Job background worker

RAILS_ENV=development bundle exec good_job start

This will start a Delayed::Job worker to perform asynchronous jobs like sending emails.

Additional test dependencies

The test suite requires a few additional dependencies to be installed. These are not required for running OpenProject in development mode, but only for running the entire test suite.

Java 7 or later

To test the integration with LDAP servers, we rely on ladle to spin up an LDAP server when running tests. As this runs ApacheDS internally, it requires Java 7 or later to be installed.

If java is not installed, some tests will stall for 60 seconds before timing out. To run the tests, install java with

brew install openjdk

# The installation instructions will tell you to add a symlink to the JDK for the `java` command to pick it up
sudo ln -sfn $(brew --prefix)/opt/openjdk/libexec/openjdk.jdk /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/openjdk.jdk

Subversion

To test the integration with Subversion repositories, we rely on the svnadmin command to be available. If subversion is not installed, the tests will be skipped. To run the tests, install subversion with

brew install subversion

Git

To test the integration with Git repositories, we rely on the git command to be available. Git is either installed via the Xcode Command Line Tools, with Xcode or via homebrew.

xcode-select --install

# or

brew install git

Known issues

Spawning a lot of browser tabs

If you haven’t run this command for a while, chances are that a lot of background jobs have queued up and might cause a significant amount of open tabs (due to the way we deliver mails with the letter_opener gem). To get rid of the jobs before starting the worker, use the following command. This will remove all currently scheduled jobs, never use this in a production setting.

RAILS_ENV=development bin/rails runner "Delayed::Job.delete_all"