Compiling Mattermost

Before compiling Mattermost, make sure to set up your developer machine according to the instructions for your platform.

Instructions are available for the following platforms:

Mattermost uses GNU Make to control the generation of builds, to run the test suite, and to manage the build environment. You must run the make command from within the source directory. If you set up your developer machine according to the instructions, you can change to the source directory with the following command:

cd ~/go/src/github.com/mattermost/platform

The first time that you use the make run command can take a substantial amount of time depending on your machine’s processor speed and memory size, and on the speed of your network. If you are developing in a VM, make sure that the VM has at least 2G of memory assigned to it.

To start contributing to Mattermost, see Developer Flow.

Useful Make Commands

make run
Starts the Docker container, compiles the server and client code, and makes Mattermost available at http://localhost:8065 on the machine that you ran this command on. The first time that you use this command, the MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Inbucket Docker images are downloaded and installed.
make test
Runs the unit tests for server and client.
make test-server
Runs the unit tests for server only.
make test-client
Runs the unit tests for client only.
make clean
Removes all output files, including log files and executable binaries.
make start-docker
Starts the Docker container.
make stop-docker
Stops the Docker container.
make clean-docker
Removes all content from the databases in the Docker container and resets them to their original state.
make build-linux, make build-osx, and make build-windows
Builds the server for the specified platform. See the make package command for instructions on how to set up for cross-compiling.
make build
Builds the server for Linux, OS X, and Windows platforms. See the make package command for instructions on how to set up for cross-compiling.
make build-client
Builds the web client, which is the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code that gets downloaded to the browser.
make package

Creates packages for distributing your builds and puts them in the ~/go/src/github.com/mattermost/platform/dist directory. If you want to make packages for targets other than your build machine, you must run the following commands first:

  1. Modify permissions on /usr/local/go. Replace {user} and {group} with the user and group that you are logged in with.

    sudo chown -R {user}.{group} /usr/local/go

  2. If you are not developing on OS X, set up your environment to cross-compile Apple OS X binaries:

    env GOOS=darwin GOARCH=amd64 go install std

  3. If you are not developing on Windows, set up your environment to cross-compile Windows binaries:

    1. env GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 go install std
    2. sudo apt-get install zip

  4. If you are not developing on Linux, set up your environment to cross-compile Linux binaries:

env GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go install std