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Contributing Guide

Interested in making GrowthBook better? So are we! This guide should help get you setup with a local development environment so you can make changes, create PRs, and get your code merged.

If you just want to contribute a client library in a new language and not make changes to the app itself, you can skip the instructions here and view https://docs.growthbook.io/lib/build-your-own instead.

Requirements

  • MacOS or Linux (Windows may work too, but we haven't tested it)
  • NodeJS 18.x or above
    • Check version by running node -v on terminal
  • Yarn
  • Python 3.9+ (for the stats engine)
  • Docker (for running MongoDB locally)

Windows users

One sure shot way to run GrowthBook on Windows is through installing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). These are some of the steps to follow, also outlined in the link above:

  1. Search for your terminal app in the windows search bar
  2. Select the option to "Run as administrator"
  3. Now, on the terminal, run wsl --install
  4. After the installation is complete, restart your computer
  5. Set up your Linux username and password
  6. Run sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade (for Ubuntu or Debian) to update and upgrade packages

Now you have the basic Linux system set up, and can follow along with all the other steps.

It's strongly recommended that if you are using WSL on Windows that you run the project from your /home/:user directory rather than a /mnt/ directory: the /mnt directory has poor performance, and the file watcher for nodemon will not work, requiring you to manually stop and re-run the yarn dev command.

Getting started

  1. Fork the project
  2. Clone your forked project by running git clone git@github.com:{ YOUR_USERNAME }/growthbook.git
    • Can also use git clone and list the HTTPS URL of the repo afterwards
  3. Run cd growthbook
  4. Run yarn to install dependencies
  5. Install poetry
    • Run curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 -
    • Close and reopen your terminal
    • Run poetry --version to confirm a successful install
    • If unsuccessful add the Poetry path (ex. $HOME/.poetry/bin) to your global path (ex. /etc/profile, /etc/environment, ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc)
  6. Run yarn setup to do the initial build
  7. If you have Docker installed, start MongoDB in Docker:
docker run -d -p 27017:27017 --name mongo \
  -e MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_USERNAME=root \
  -e MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_PASSWORD=password \
  -v ~/gb_mongo_data/:/data/db \
  mongo

The -v is optional and will store the data in your ~/gb_mongo_data directory on your computer. This will allow you to start a new docker container with the same command in case the old one dies preserving your data. Setup can also be shared between devs by replacing the contents of that directory with theirs.

If docker isn't running, view this. Look at this for other docker issues with Linux

Otherwise, install Mongo directly (no Docker)

  1. Run yarn dev to start the app in dev mode
  2. Visit http://localhost:3000 in your browser and verify the app is working correctly

Changing Configuration Settings

If you need to change any of the default configuration settings, you can use environment variables:

  • Back-end: cp packages/back-end/.env.example packages/back-end/.env.local
  • Front-end: cp packages/front-end/.env.example packages/front-end/.env.local

Then, edit the .env.local files as needed.

Writing code!

This repository is a monorepo with the following packages:

  • packages/front-end is a Next.js app and contains the full UI of the GrowthBook app.
  • packages/back-end is an Express app and serves as the REST api for the front-end.
  • packages/shared is a collection of Typescript functions and constants shared between the front-end and back-end.
  • packages/sdk-js is our javascript SDK (@growthbook/growthbook on npm)
  • packages/sdk-react is our React SDK (@growthbook/growthbook-react on npm)
  • packages/stats is our Python stats engine (gbstats on PyPi)
  • docs is a Docusaurus instance for our documentation site (https://docs.growthbook.io).

Depending on what you're changing, you may need to edit one or more of these packages.

Enterprise Code

The front-end, back-end, and shared packages each have an enterprise directory containing non-open source code. We typically do not accept outside contributions to these directories. Please reach out if you have any questions.

Working on the main app

The yarn dev command starts both the front-end and back-end in parallel.

The packages are available at the following urls with hot-reloading:

Accessing the MongoDB database

GrowthBook uses MongoDB as a primary data store, and while working on the code it may be necessary to access the database directly. MongoDB Compass is the easiest way, but you can also use the mongosh shell.

MongoDB Compass

To access MongoDB with the MongoDB Compass GUI, you can do the following after opening MongoDB Compass:

  1. In the menu bar, click Connect and choose New Connection
  2. Paste the connection string you configured in your .env.local here
  3. Press Connect

At this point you should be connected to MongoDB and see your databases. Click into the desired database, e.g. growthbook, to view your collections.

Mongo Shell

To access MongoDB with the mongosh shell, run the following command:

docker exec -it mongo bash

Alternatively, if you are using Docker Desktop, you can click the CLI button to execute the shell for the Mongo container.

Then login as the user of the database. If your user is root:

mongosh -u root
mongosh Commands
  • show dbs should show you the databases in Mongo
  • use <databasename> will allow you to change to the right database. By default, you may be in another database and may need to call use growthbook
  • show collections should show you the collections for the database you are using. This will throw an error if you are not logged in as the correct user.
  • db is available and you should be able to run queries against it, e.g. db.users.find()

Working on docs

To start the docs site, first cd docs and then run yarn to install and yarn dev to run the docs server. You can view the site at http://localhost:3200

Working on the SDKs

To work on the SDKs, cd into the desired directory and the following commands are available:

  • yarn test - Run the test suite
  • yarn build - Run the rollup build process
  • yarn size - Get the gzip size of the bundle (must run yarn build first)

Releasing SDK Updates

Releasing SDK updates is a very manual process right now. It requires bumping versions in many different files, updating changelogs, and adding metadata to shared packages.

  1. Create a branch from the latest main
  2. Run yarn bump-sdk-version patch (or minor or major)
  3. Add new entry to packages/sdk-js/CHANGELOG.md
  4. If any new capabilities were added, update relevant packages/shared/src/sdk-versioning/sdk-versions/ files (javascript, nodejs, react, nocode). Also re-generate the sdk-info in docs.
  5. Do a global search for the old version string to make sure nothing was missed. Update the bump-version.js script if you find anything.
  6. Create a PR and let CI complete successfully. Use the changelog entry as the PR description.
  7. Publish the Javascript SDK
    • yarn build
    • npm publish
  8. Publish the React SDK
    • yarn build
    • npm publish
  9. Merge the PR

Working on the stats engine

Ensure you have run yarn setup first to install the poetry virtual environment before working in the stats engine. Otherwise, pre-commit hooks and the following commands will error.

  • yarn workspace stats test - Run pytest
  • yarn workspace stats lint - Run flake8, black, and pyright
  • yarn workspace stats build - Run the build process
  • yarn workspace stats notebook - Spin up a Jupyter Notebook with gbstats and other dependencies in the kernel

You can also just run yarn * where * is test, lint, build if you cd to the packages/stats directory first.

Code Quality

There are a few repo-wide code quality tools:

  • yarn test - Run the full test suite on all packages
  • yarn type-check - Typescript type checking
  • yarn lint - Typescript code linting
  • yarn workspace stats lint - Python code linting (ensure you have run yarn setup first to install the poetry virtual environment)

There is a pre-commit hook that runs yarn lint automatically, so you shouldn't need to run that yourself.

Opening Pull Requests

  1. Please Provide a thoughtful commit message and push your changes to your fork using git push origin main (assuming your forked project is using origin for the remote name and you are on the main branch).

  2. Open a Pull Request on GitHub with a description of your changes.

Troubleshooting

/bin/activate: No such file or directory

If you see this warning, it is likely because you ran yarn setup from within a Python virtual environment, and Poetry currently does not create a custom environment for the stats library from within another virtual environment (see: python-poetry/poetry#4055).

To resolve this, ensure you are not using a Python virtual environment and re-run yarn setup from the project root.

Getting Help

Join our Slack community if you need help getting set up or want to chat. We're also happy to hop on a call and do some pair programming.