Contributing to Hestia’s development ​

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.

Creating a virtual machine for development ​

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.

multipass unmount hestia-dev
multipass mount $HOME/projects/hestiacp hestia-dev:/home/ubuntu/hestiacp

1. Install Multipass for your OS.

2. Fork Hestia and clone the repository to your local machine

   bash

   git clone https://github.com/YourUsername/hestiacp.git $HOME/projects

3. Create an Ubuntu VM with at least 2G of memory and 15G of disk space

   bash

   multipass launch --name hestia-dev --memory 2G --disk 15G

4. Map your cloned repository to the VM's home directory

   bash

   multipass mount $HOME/projects/hestiacp hestia-dev:/home/ubuntu/hestiacp

5. SSH into the VM as root and install some required packages

   bash

   multipass exec hestia-dev -- sudo bash
   sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y jq libjq1

6. Install Node JS and Yarn npm install --global yarn

7. Build the theme files with

   bash

   yarn set version stable
   yarn install
   yarn build

8. Navigate to /src and build Hestia packages

   bash

   cd src
   ./hst_autocompile.sh --hestia --noinstall --keepbuild '~localsrc'

9. Navigate to /install and install Hestia

   (update the installation flags to your liking, note that login credentials are set here)

   bash

   cd ../install
   bash hst-install-ubuntu.sh -D /tmp/hestiacp-src/deb/ --interactive no --email [email protected] --password Password123 --hostname demo.hestiacp.com -f

10. Reboot VM (and exit SSH session)

    bash

    reboot

11. Find the IP address of the VM

    bash

    multipass list

12. 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)

    bash

    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.

Making changes to Hestia ​

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.

1. At the root of the project on your local machine, install Node dependencies

   bash

   yarn install

2. 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:

   bash

   yarn build

3. SSH into the VM as root and navigate to /src

   bash

   multipass exec hestia-dev -- sudo bash
   cd src

4. Run the Hestia build script

   bash

   ./hst_autocompile.sh --hestia --install '~localsrc'

5. Reload the page in your browser to see your changes

Please refer to the contributing guidelines for more details on submitting code changes for review.

Building packages ​

Here is more detailed information about the build scripts that are run from src:

Build packages only ​

# Only Hestia
./hst_autocompile.sh --hestia --noinstall --keepbuild '~localsrc'

# Hestia + hestia-nginx and hestia-php
./hst_autocompile.sh --all --noinstall --keepbuild '~localsrc'

Build and install packages ​

# Only Hestia
./hst_autocompile.sh --hestia --install '~localsrc'

# Hestia + hestia-nginx and hestia-php
./hst_autocompile.sh --all --install '~localsrc'

Installing Hestia from a branch ​

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.

Updating Hestia from GitHub ​

The following is useful for pulling the latest staging/beta changes from GitHub and compiling the changes.

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

Running automated tests ​

For automated tests we currently use Bats.

Install ​

# 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

Run ​

# Run Hestia tests
test/test.bats