Skip to content

Development Environment Setup

I truly appreciate all contributions! To help keep this project maintainable, this guide provides an overview of project priorities, key design considerations, and overall philosophy. It also includes instructions for setting up your environment so you can start contributing right away.

Development Guidelines

Before starting development, please review the following guidelines.

Priority Order (Highest to Lowest)

  1. 🔼 Fixing core bugs that lack workarounds
  2. 🔵 Adding core functionality that unlocks other features (e.g., plugins)
  3. 🔵 Refactoring to enable faster development
  4. 🔽 UI improvements (PRs welcome, but low priority)

Design Philosophy

The application architecture is designed for extensibility and maintainability. It relies heavily on configuration manifests via plugins and settings to dynamically build the UI and populate the application with data from various sources.

For details, see:
- Plugins Development (includes video)
- Settings System

Focus on core functionality and integrate with existing tools rather than reinventing the wheel.

Examples:
- Using Apprise for notifications instead of implementing multiple separate gateways
- Implementing regex-based validation instead of one-off validation for each setting

Note

UI changes have lower priority. PRs are welcome, but please keep them small and focused.

Development Environment Set Up

The following steps will guide you to set up your environment for local development and to run a custom docker build on your system. For most changes the container doesn't need to be rebuild which speeds up the development significantly.

Note

Replace /development with the path where your code files will be stored. The default container name is netalertx so there might be a conflict with your running containers.

1. Download the code:

  • mkdir /development
  • cd /development && git clone https://github.com/jokob-sk/NetAlertX.git

2. Create a DEV .env_dev file

touch /development/.env_dev && sudo nano /development/.env_dev

The file content should be following, with your custom values.

#--------------------------------
#NETALERTX
#--------------------------------
TZ=Europe/Berlin
PORT=22222    # make sure this port is unique on your whole network
DEV_LOCATION=/development/NetAlertX
APP_DATA_LOCATION=/volume/docker_appdata
# Make sure your GRAPHQL_PORT setting has a port that is unique on your whole host network
APP_CONF_OVERRIDE={"GRAPHQL_PORT":"22223"} 
# ALWAYS_FRESH_INSTALL=true # uncommenting this will always delete the content of /config and /db dirs on boot to simulate a fresh install

3. Create /db and /config dirs

Create a folder netalertx in the APP_DATA_LOCATION (in this example in /volume/docker_appdata) with 2 subfolders db and config.

  • mkdir /volume/docker_appdata/netalertx
  • mkdir /volume/docker_appdata/netalertx/db
  • mkdir /volume/docker_appdata/netalertx/config

4. Run the container

  • cd /development/NetAlertX && sudo docker-compose --env-file ../.env_dev

You can then modify the python script without restarting/rebuilding the container every time. Additionally, you can trigger a plugin run via the UI:

image

Tips

A quick cheat sheet of useful commands.

Removing the container and image

A command to stop, remove the container and the image (replace netalertx and netalertx-netalertx with the appropriate values)

  • sudo docker container stop netalertx ; sudo docker container rm netalertx ; sudo docker image rm netalertx-netalertx

Restart the server backend

Most code changes can be tested without rebuilding the container. When working on the python server backend, you only need to restart the server.

  1. You can usually restart the backend via Maintenance > Logs > Restart server

image

  1. If above doesn't work, SSH into the container and kill & restart the main script loop

  2. sudo docker exec -it netalertx /bin/bash

  3. pkill -f "python /app/server" && python /app/server &

  4. If none of the above work, restart the docker container.

  5. This is usually the last resort as sometimes the Docker engine becomes unresponsive and the whole engine needs to be restarted.

Contributing & Pull Requests

Before submitting a PR, please ensure:

✔ Changes are backward-compatible with existing installs.
✔ No unnecessary changes are made.
✔ New features are reusable, not narrowly scoped.
✔ Features are implemented via plugins if possible.

Mandatory Test Cases

  • Fresh install (no DB/config).
  • Existing DB/config compatibility.

  • Notification testing:

    • Email
    • Apprise (e.g., Telegram)
    • Webhook (e.g., Discord)
    • MQTT (e.g., Home Assistant)

  • Updating Settings and their persistence.

  • Updating a Device
  • Plugin functionality.
  • Error log inspection.

Unit Tests

Warning

Please note these test modify data in the database.

  1. See the /test directory for available test cases. These are not exhaustive but cover the main API endpoints.
  2. To run a test case, SSH into the container:
    sudo docker exec -it netalertx /bin/bash
  3. Inside the container, install pytest (if not already installed):
    pip install pytest
  4. Run a specific test case:
    pytest /app/test/TESTFILE.py