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Installing Calypso

You can install Calypso directly on your machine by following the next steps, or use a portable development environment:

Quick Summary of Steps

  1. Check that you have all prerequisites (Git, Node, NPM). See below for more details. Pay close attention to software versions.
  2. Clone this repository locally.
  3. Add 127.0.0.1 calypso.localhost to your local hosts file.
  4. Execute npm start from the root directory of the repository.
  5. Open calypso.localhost:3000 in your browser.

Prerequisites

To be able to clone the repository and run the application you need:

  • Install the Node.js and matching NPM versions listed in the "engines" section of package.json (this bit about versions is important, that's why I'm using bold). On Mac OS X and Linux using nvm or n makes it easy to manage node versions. On Windows you may want to try nvm-windows or nodist.
  • Please note that in Debian/Ubuntu versions of Linux, node command is renamed to nodejs. This will cause Calypso to fail during installation. Follow the instructions here to create a symlink to node.
  • Git. Try the git command from your terminal, if it's not found then use this installer.

Installing and Running

Clone this git repository to your machine via the terminal using the git clone command and then run npm start from the root Calypso directory:

$ git clone https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso.git
$ cd wp-calypso
$ npm start

Note - if you are planning on pushing changes back to Calypso, this workflow will ask you for a username and password every time you push a change, which will not work if you have GitHub 2-factor auth enabled. In this case you should use git clone git@github.com:Automattic/wp-calypso.git instead, and follow the instructions here to set up authentication.

The npm start command will install any npm dependencies and start the development server. When changes are made to either the JavaScript files or the Sass stylesheets, the build process will run automatically. The build process compiles both the JavaScript and CSS to make sure that you have the latest versions of both.

To run Calypso locally, you'll need to add 127.0.0.1 calypso.localhost to your hosts file, and load the app at http://calypso.localhost:3000 instead of just localhost. This is necessary, because when running locally Calypso is using the remote version of the WordPress.com REST API, which allows only certain origins via our current authentication methods.

If your browser is set to block 3rd-party cookies, you should set an exception on https://public-api.wordpress.com in order for Calypso to work correctly on the said origin.

See Development Workflow for more.

Starting the node debugger

The npm start command will pass anything set in the NODE_ARGS environment variable as an option to the Node command. This means that if you want to start up the debugger on a specific port you can run NODE_ARGS="--debug=5858" npm start. Starting the built-in inspector can also be done by running NODE_ARGS="--inspect" npm start. In either case, if you would like to debug the build process as well, it might be convenient to have the inspector break on the first line and wait for you. In that case, you should also pass in the --debug-brk option like so NODE_ARGS="--inspect --debug-brk" npm start.

Using a portable development environment

You can install Calypso very quickly via a portable development environment called Calypso Bootstrap. It uses Vagrant and Puppet behind the scenes to install and configure a virtual machine with Calypso ready to run - with a single command.