Setting Up for Local Development

This page provides information on various required and recommended tools, programs and resources for developing the CIPP React frontend.

It's recommended that you have the following installed on the computer you're using for development:

• Visual Studio Code (VSCode) winget install --exact vscode

• These VSCode extensions:

  • Azure Functions

  • ESLint

  • npm

  • npm Intellisense

  • Prettier

  • Stylelint

• PowerShell 7 winget install --exact PowerShell

• git winget install --exact git

• node.js V18.X LTS

• .NET Core 3.1

• .NET SDK 5

• .NET SDK 6 winget install --exact Microsoft.DotNet.SDK.6

This page guides you through getting setup to develop for CIPP using the command line to perform operations with git and npm. There are graphical user interfaces for these tools but they won't be covered in this documentation. The commands below are broadly OS agnostic.

Using npm which is included with nodejs you're going to install the Azure Static Web Apps CLI, the Azure Functions Core Tools and the Azurite storage emulator globally.

Depending on your system setup you may have to run the following commands as an administrator in order for npm to write the package files into its global package folder. Globally installed npm packages are available to all users.

npm install --global @azure/static-web-apps-cli

npm install --global azure-functions-core-tools@4 --unsafe-perms true

npm install --global azurite

Now we need to get the files downloaded for CIPP. In order to properly test as you develop the CIPP frontend we need a copy of your CIPP and CIPP-API repositories.

:::info Forking repositories You're going to want to work on a forked copy of the CIPP and CIPP-API repositories.

For the rest of this guide we assume that your forks are at:

• CIPP - https://github.com/goodatforking/CIPP

• CIPP-API - https://github.com/goodatforking/CIPP-API :::

:::tip What's a repository? A Git repository is the .git/ folder which you'll find inside many projects like CIPP. This repository tracks all changes made to files in the project, changes to these files are commited to the repository (repo) which then builds up a history of the project. :::

The CIPP and CIPP-API repositories need to be located alongside each other (siblings) - so we're looking for a folder structure that looks like this:

- CIPP-Project
-- CIPP
-- CIPP-API

So if we assume that we want our CIPP-Project directory in X:\Development we're going to do the following:

cd "X:\Development"
mkdir "CIPP-Project"
cd "CIPP-Project"
git clone https://github.com/goodatforking/CIPP --origin goodatforking
git clone https://github.com/goodatforking/CIPP-API --origin goodatforking

When you clone a git repository you automatically get a remote this is a pointer (usually a URL) to a remote copy of the git repository which you can push changes to. By default your first remote is called origin. But that doesn't really mean much to most people. In the commands above we're using --origin goodatforking to tell git that we want our first remote (origin) to be called goodatforking.

At this point we could start working on the code - we have our pre-requisites and we have to code setup as we need it, but we're going to do one last thing to make life easier down the road.

We're going to add Kelvin's original repository as upstream.

cd "CIPP"
git remote add upstream https://github.com/KelvinTegelaar/CIPP
cd ..
cd "CIPP-API"
git remote add upstream https://github.com/KelvinTegelaar/CIPP-API
cd ..

When working on open source projects it's often helpful to keep your stable / tested code separate from your under-development code. We can achieve this with git by using branches. The CIPP project uses the following branches:

• main - Our stable/tested code - this is where releases are created (tagged).

• dev - Our development code - this is the branch where active development takes place.

• docs - The CIPP documentation files aka. the content of the website you are reading this from.

We're going to want to work from the dev branch since that's where the latest development code is, switching branches in git is achieved by doing a checkout on the branch.

cd "CIPP"
git checkout dev
cd ..
cd "CIPP-API"
git checkout dev
cd ..

That's it - we've got our repositories setup locally and on the dev branch, our local environment is setup and ready to develop the CIPP UI. Read on through this section for further instructions.