Contributing

We welcome everyone to contribute to Plausible. This document is to help you on setting up your environment, finding a task, and opening pull requests.

Development setup

The easiest way to get up and running is to install and use Docker for running both Postgres and Clickhouse.

Make sure Docker, Elixir, Erlang and Node.js are all installed on your development machine. The .tool-versions file is available to use with asdf or similar tools.

Start the environment:

Run both make postgres and make clickhouse.
1. If you are using Apple Silicon (any of the M1 or similar SoC variants), make clickhouse-arm offers a development-only substitute that will work on your local machine. Not intended for production.
You can set up everything with make install, alternatively run each command separately:
1. Run mix deps.get. This will download the required Elixir dependencies.
2. Run mix ecto.create. This will create the required databases in both Postgres and Clickhouse.
3. Run mix ecto.migrate to build the database schema.
4. Run npm ci --prefix assets to install the required node dependencies.
5. Run mix download_country_database to fetch geolocation database
Run make server or mix phx.server to start the Phoenix server.
The system is now available on localhost:8000.

Creating an account

Navigate to http://localhost:8000/register and fill in the form.
Fill in the rest of the forms and for the domain use dummy.site
Skip the JS snippet and click start collecting data.
Run make dummy_event from the terminal to generate a fake pageview event for the dummy site.
You should now be all set!

Stopping Docker containers

Stop and remove the Postgres container with make postgres-stop.
Stop and remove the Clickhouse container with make clickhouse-stop.

Volumes are preserved. You'll find that the Postgres and Clickhouse state are retained when you bring them up again the next time: no need to re-register and so on.

Note: Since we are deleting the containers, be careful when deleting volumes with docker volume prune. You might accidentally delete the database and would have to go through re-registration process.

Pre-commit hooks

pre-commit requires Python to be available locally and covers Elixir, JavaScript, and CSS. Set up with pip install --user pre-commit followed by pre-commit install. Conversely, if the prompts are far too bothersome, remove with pre-commit uninstall.

Finding a task

Bugs can be found in our issue tracker. Issues are usually up for grabs.

New features need to be discussed with the core team and the community first. If you're tackling a feature, please make sure it has been already discussed in the Discussions tab. We kindly ask contributors to use the discussion comment section to propose a solution before opening a pull request.

Pull requests without an associated issue or discussion may still be merged, but we will focus on changes that have already been talked through.

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