docspell/website/site/content/docs/dev/development.md

+++ title = "Tips & Setup" weight = 20 +++

Starting Servers with reStart

When developing, it's very convenient to use the revolver sbt plugin. Start the sbt console and then run:

sbt:docspell-root> restserver/reStart

This starts a REST server. Once this started up, type:

sbt:docspell-root> joex/reStart

if also a joex component is required. Prefixing the commads with ~, results in recompile+restart once a source file is modified.

It is possible to start both in the root project:

sbt:docspell-root> reStart

Custom config file

The sbt build is setup such that a file dev.conf in the directory local (at root of the source tree) is picked up as config file, if it exists. So you can create a custom config file for development. For example, a custom database for development may be setup this way:

#jdbcurl = "jdbc:h2:///home/dev/workspace/projects/docspell/local/docspell-demo.db;MODE=PostgreSQL;DATABASE_TO_LOWER=TRUE;AUTO_SERVER=TRUE"
jdbcurl = "jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/docspelldev"
#jdbcurl = "jdbc:mariadb://localhost:3306/docspelldev"

docspell.server {
  backend {
    jdbc {
      url = ${jdbcurl}
      user = "dev"
      password = "dev"
    }
  }
}

docspell.joex {
  jdbc {
    url = ${jdbcurl}
    user = "dev"
    password = "dev"
  }
  scheduler {
    pool-size = 1
  }
}

Nix Expressions

The directory /nix contains nix expressions to install docspell via the nix package manager and to integrate it into NixOS.

Testing NixOS Modules

The modules can be build by building the configuration-test.nix file together with some nixpkgs version. For example:

nixos-rebuild build-vm -I nixos-config=./configuration-test.nix \
  -I nixpkgs=https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels/archive/nixos-19.09.tar.gz

This will build all modules imported in configuration-test.nix and create a virtual machine containing the system. After that completes, the system configuration can be found behind the ./result/system symlink. So it is possible to look at the generated systemd config for example:

cat result/system/etc/systemd/system/docspell-joex.service

And with some more commands (there probably is an easier way…) the config file can be checked:

cat result/system/etc/systemd/system/docspell-joex.service | grep ExecStart | cut -d'=' -f2 | xargs cat | tail -n1 | awk '{print $NF}'| sed 's/.$//' | xargs cat | jq

To see the module in action, the vm can be started (the first line sets more memory for the vm):

export QEMU_OPTS="-m 2048"
./result/bin/run-docspelltest-vm

Background Info

There is a list of ADRs containing internal/background info for various topics.