Hestia is an open-source project, and we welcome contributions from the community. Please read the contributing guidelines for additional information.
Hestia is designed to be installed on a web server. To develop Hestia on your local machine, a virtual machine is recommend.
::: warning Development builds are unstable. If you encounter a bug please report it via GitHub or submit a Pull Request. :::
These are example instructions for creating a virtual machine running Hestia for development.
These instructions use Multipass to create the VM. Feel free to adapt the commands for any virtualization software you prefer.
::: warning Sometimes the mapping between the source code directory on your local machine to the directory in the VM can be lost. If this happens simply unmount and remount e.g.
multipass unmount hestia-dev
multipass mount $HOME/projects/hestiacp hestia-dev:/home/ubuntu/hestiacp
:::
Install Multipass for your OS.
Fork Hestia and clone the repository to your local machine
git clone https://github.com/YourUsername/hestiacp.git $HOME/projects
Create an Ubuntu VM with at least 2G of memory and 15G of disk space
multipass launch --name hestia-dev --memory 2G --disk 15G
Map your cloned repository to the VM's home directory
multipass mount $HOME/projects/hestiacp hestia-dev:/home/ubuntu/hestiacp
SSH into the VM as root and install some required packages
multipass exec hestia-dev -- sudo bash
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y jq libjq1
Install Node JS and Yarn npm install --global yarn
Build the theme files with
yarn set version stable
yarn install
yarn build
Navigate to /src and build Hestia packages
cd src
./hst_autocompile.sh --hestia --noinstall --keepbuild '~localsrc'
Navigate to /install and install Hestia
(update the installation flags to your liking, note that login credentials are set here)
cd ../install
bash hst-install-ubuntu.sh -D /tmp/hestiacp-src/deb/ --interactive no --email admin@example.com --password Password123 --hostname demo.hestiacp.com -f
Reboot VM (and exit SSH session)
reboot
Find the IP address of the VM
multipass list
Visit the VM's IP address in your browser using the default Hestia port and login with admin/Password123
(bypass any SSL errors you see when loading the page)
e.g. https://192.168.64.15:8083
Hestia is now running in a virtual machine. If you'd like to make changes to the source code and test them, please continue to the next section.
After setting up Hestia in a VM you can now make changes to the source code in $HOME/projects/hestiacp on your local machine using your editor of choice.
The following are example instructions for making a change to Hestia's UI and testing it locally.
::: info Please ensure you have Yarn v3 installed and are using Node.js v16 or higher. :::
At the root of the project on your local machine, install Node dependencies
yarn install
Make a change to a file that we can later test, then build the UI assets
e.g. change the body background color to red in web/css/src/base.css then run:
yarn build
SSH into the VM as root and navigate to /src
multipass exec hestia-dev -- sudo bash
cd src
Run the Hestia build script
./hst_autocompile.sh --hestia --install '~localsrc'
Reload the page in your browser to see your changes
::: info
A backup is created each time the Hestia build script is run. If you run this a lot it can fill up your VM's disk space.
You can delete the backups by running rm -rf /root/hst_backups as root user on the VM.
:::
Please refer to the contributing guidelines for more details on submitting code changes for review.
::: info
For building hestia-nginx or hestia-php, at least 2 GB of memory is required!
:::
Here is more detailed information about the build scripts that are run from src:
# Only Hestia
./hst_autocompile.sh --hestia --noinstall --keepbuild '~localsrc'
# Hestia + hestia-nginx and hestia-php
./hst_autocompile.sh --all --noinstall --keepbuild '~localsrc'
::: info Use if you have Hestia already installed, for your changes to take effect. :::
# Only Hestia
./hst_autocompile.sh --hestia --install '~localsrc'
# Hestia + hestia-nginx and hestia-php
./hst_autocompile.sh --all --install '~localsrc'
The following is useful for testing a Pull Request or a branch on a fork.
Make sure to install Node JS and Yarn npm install --global yarn before.
# Replace with https://github.com/username/hestiacp.git if you want to test a branch that you created yourself
git clone https://github.com/hestiacp/hestiacp.git
cd ./hestiacp/
# Replace main with the branch you want to test
git checkout main
# Enable Yarn 3.x
yarn set version stable
# Install Dependencies
yarn install
# Build
yarn build
cd ./src/
# Compile packages
./hst_autocompile.sh --all --noinstall --keepbuild '~localsrc'
cd ../install
bash hst-install-{os}.sh --with-debs /tmp/hestiacp-src/deb/
Any option can be appended to the installer command. See the complete list.
The following is useful for pulling the latest staging/beta changes from GitHub and compiling the changes.
::: info
The following method only supports building the hestia package. If you need to build hestia-nginx or hestia-php, use one of the previous commands.
:::
v-update-sys-hestia-git [USERNAME] [BRANCH]
Note: Sometimes dependencies will get added or removed when the packages are installed with dpkg. It is not possible to preload the dependencies. If this happens, you will see an error like this:
dpkg: error processing package hestia (–install):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
To solve this issue, run:
apt install -f
For automated tests we currently use Bats.
# Clone Hestia repo with testing submodules
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/hestiacp/hestiacp
# Or, using an existing local repo with an up-to-date main branch
git submodule update --init --recursive
# Install Bats
test/test_helper/bats-core/install.sh /usr/local
::: danger Do not run any testing script on a live server. It might cause issues or downtime! :::
# Run Hestia tests
test/test.bats