Quickstart

This guide will help you setup a small Drop instance to develop against on your local development machine.

Install Docker

Docker is required to start the database, and optionally run a pre-built version of Drop. You should follow the Docker guide for your system on the official Docker documentation.

Option 1: Full Docker setup

The easier and fastest option is to spin up an instance of Drop within a Docker container. While you can't develop against Drop's nightly version, it's fast and headache-free.

This compose.yaml requires no additional configuration (other than the Drop setup wizard) to start up:

services:
  postgres:
    image: postgres:14-alpine
    ports:
      - 5432:5432
    healthcheck:
      test: pg_isready -d drop -U drop
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 60s
      retries: 5
      start_period: 10s
    volumes:
      - ./db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=drop
      - POSTGRES_USER=drop
      - POSTGRES_DB=drop
  drop:
    image: ghcr.io/drop-oss/drop:latest
    depends_on:
      postgres:
        condition: service_healthy
    ports:
      - 3000:3000
    volumes:
      - ./library:/library
      - ./data:/data
    environment:
      - DATABASE_URL=postgres://drop:drop@postgres:5432/drop
      - EXTERNAL_URL=http://localhost:3000

Option 2: From source (nightly)

You can alternatively run Drop from source, and use Docker for the database.

Clone the GitHub repository

First, clone the Drop repository:

git clone https://github.com/Drop-OSS/drop.git

Checkout your preferred branch

By default, Git selects the develop branch, which is what nightly is released from. You may want to checkout a tag (e.g. v0.3.2), or the main branch (latest stable).

Install dependencies

We use the yarn package manager. Install dependencies with:

yarn

Start the database

Open another shell (or the same one, if you're okay with running the database in the background), and cd into the dev-tools directory. Then, start the database:

docker compose up [-d]

(-d if you want to run it in the background)

Start Drop

Then, move back to the root of the repository, and then start Drop:

yarn dev