Developing on Coral

Running Coral for development is very similar to installing Coral via Source as described in our Getting Started guide.

Coral requires NodeJS ^18.16.0, we recommend using nvm to help manage node versions: https://github.com/creationix/nvm.

# Clone and cd into the Coral directory.
git clone https://github.com/coralproject/talk.git
cd talk

# Install dependencies.
sh scripts/pnpm-i.sh

Running Coral with default settings assumes that you have:

• MongoDB ^4.2 running on 127.0.0.1:27017
• Redis ^3.2 running on 127.0.0.1:6379

If you don't already have these databases running, you can execute the following assuming you have Docker installed on your local machine:

docker run -d -p 27017:27017 --restart always --name mongo mongo:4.2
docker run -d -p 6379:6379 --restart always --name redis redis:3.2

Then initialize Coral using the helper script:

sh initialize.sh

Then inside the client/ folder run:

pnpm run watch

Then open another terminal inside the server/ folder and similarly run:

pnpm run watch

These two terminals will run through some build steps and start the system up in development mode. The client/ hosts the front end code and the server/ hosts the GraphQL API and underlying data management with Redis and Mongo.

When the client code has been built, navigate to http://localhost:8080/install to start the installation wizard.

To see the comment stream goto http://localhost:8080/.

To modify environment variables:

Place and modify a .env file within server/.

Similar to other applications, development environment variables are picked up from a .env file. However, since Coral is a mono-repo, you need to create this file within the server/ folder. This allows Coral's web server to pick up on the configuration at its relative startup root.

To run linting and tests use the following commands:

# Run the linters.
sh scripts/lint.sh

# Inside client, server you can run our unit and integration tests
pnpm run test

Email

To test out the email sending functionality, you can run inbucket which provides a test SMTP server that can visualize emails in the browser:

docker run -d --name inbucket --restart always -p 2500:2500 -p 9001:9000 inbucket/inbucket

You can then configure the email server on Coral by setting the email settings in Configure -> Email in the admin:

Field	Value
From Address	community@test.com
Secure	No
Host	localhost
Port	2500
Authentication	No

Navigate to http://localhost:9001, click the "Monitor" tab. New emails received on this screen.

Contributing

To get started contributing, check out our Contribution Guidelines.

Contributing a Translation

We’re so proud to have received submissions from a lot of 3rd party contributors translating Coral into their own languages.

You can see what languages Coral currently supports here: https://github.com/coralproject/talk/tree/main/locales

Coral uses the fluent library and store our translations in FTL files in locales/ and server/src/core/server/locales/.

Strings are added or removed from localization bundles in the translation files as needed. Strings MUST NOT be changed after they've been committed and pushed to main. Changing a string requires creating a new ID with a new name (preferably descriptive instead of incremented) and deletion of the obsolete ID. It's often useful to add a comment above the string with info about how and where the string is used.

Once a language has enough coverage, it should be added to common/lib/helpers/i18n/locales.ts.

The Perspective API also supports comments in specific languages. When the language is supported in Coral and supported by the Perspective API, the language should be added to the language map in server/src/core/server/services/comments/pipeline/phases/toxic.ts.

To assist with the translation process, we have a script that is based on the work by @cristiandean in https://github.com/coralproject/talk/pull/2949 that will detect missing, new, or changed translation keys for the specified language. You can use this with:

# usage: ./scripts/i18n/validate.ts <locale>
./scripts/i18n/validate.ts pt-BR