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Build Vikunja from source #

To fully build Vikunja from source files, you need to build the api and frontend.

Table of contents

General Preparations #

  1. Make sure you have git installed
  2. Clone the repo with git clone https://code.vikunja.io/vikunja and switch into the directory.
  3. Check out the version you want to build with git checkout VERSION - replace VERSION with the version want to use. If you don’t do this, you’ll build the latest unstable build, which might contain bugs.

Frontend #

The code for the frontend is located in the frontend/ sub folder of the main repo.

  1. Make sure you have pnpm properly installed on your system.
  2. Install all dependencies with pnpm install
  3. Build the frontend with pnpm run build. This will result in a static js bundle in the dist/ folder.
  4. You can either deploy that static js bundle directly, or read on to learn how to bundle it all up in a static binary with the api.

API #

The Vikunja API has no other dependencies than go itself. That means compiling it boils down to these steps:

  1. Make sure Go is properly installed on your system. You’ll need at least Go 1.21.
  2. Make sure Mage is properly installed on your system.
  3. If you did not build the frontend in the steps before, you need to either do that or create a dummy index file with mkdir -p frontend/dist && touch frontend/dist/index.html.
  4. Run mage build in the source of the main repo. This will build a binary in the root of the repo which will be able to run on your system.

Build for different architectures #

To build for other platforms and architectures than the one you’re currently on, simply run mage release or mage release:{linux|windows|darwin}.

More options are available, please refer to the magefile docs for more details.