Contributing

Translations

If you want to help with translating PufferPanel please follow this link

Templates

If you want to contribute new templates or changes to existing ones please take a look at the templates repository

Development

To contribute features or bugfixes you’ll want to set up a development environment to test your changes, the following will help you with that

If you plan to contribute your changes it is generally a good idea to come to our discord server and talk to the team beforehand so you don’t end up investing your time into something someone else is already working on or might even have finished already, though that is not required

After making your changes you can contribute them by opening a pull request on the PufferPanel repository

Requirements

First of all you will need a few tools

• The golang toolchain (at least version 1.15 at the point of writing)

• NodeJS (at least version 14 at the point of writing, see here for Linux or here for Windows and macOS)

• NPM (should come bundled with NodeJS)

• A Git client (other Git clients are fine too, but the following will assume the standard Git CLI tool)

Setup

Clone the repository somewhere convenient for you with the command git clone https://github.com/PufferPanel/PufferPanel.git

The command will create new directory named PufferPanel for you, this will be referred to as the repo root or repository root

In there you will find all the source code as well as some additional files

Navigate into that directory in your command line (cd PufferPanel) and navigate into the client directory there (cd client), then run npm install to download/update the dependencies of the frontend code

You will probably want a custom config file for your development setup to be able to customize a few things like where data is stored, the following example will set all data to be stored in a directory PufferPanelData outside of the repository, enable logging of database queries and emails that would otherwise be sent and set the port the panel starts on to 8080, however you can of course cutomize it according to your needs

{
  "logs": "../PufferPanelData/logs",
  "web": {
    "host": "0.0.0.0:8080"
  },
  "token": {
    "private": "../PufferPanelData/private.pem",
    "public": "../PufferPanelData/public.pem"
  },
  "panel": {
    "database": {
      "dialect": "sqlite3",
      "url": "file:../PufferPanelData/database.db?cache=shared",
      "log": "true"
    },
    "web": {
      "files": "client/dist"
    },
    "email": {
      "templates": "assets/email/emails.json",
      "provider": "debug"
    }
  },
  "daemon": {
    "data": {
      "servers": "../PufferPanelData/servers"
      "modules": "../PufferPanelData/modules"
      "cache": "../PufferPanelData/cache"
    }
  }
}

Building

To build the backend, in the repository root, run go build -o pufferpanel github.com/pufferpanel/pufferpanel/v2/cmd

This produces a binary that you can run using the command ./pufferpanel

To build the frontend, navigate to the client directory in the repo

If you want to make a development build, run npm run dev-build, or to keep the process running and have it automatically recompile any changes you make you can run npm run dev-watch

A development build will provide some helpers useful for debugging and a global pufferpanel object you can access in the browser console for some quick testing, however development builds are also bigger in file size and less performant

If you want to make a production build, run npm run build

A production build is smaller in size but is harder to debug as it doesn’t supply the afore mentioned helpers like source maps etc

The build output will be generated in the dist directory (that is also why the above example config lists client/dist as the location for the web files)