Share your Discourse dev setup

dev
7

OS and Discourse

My dev install is based on the official Ubuntu install guide on Ubuntu 18.04 and I’m very happy with the performance.

Editor

I use Atom with the following packages:

  1. Prettier to format code on save

  2. Atom IDE which gives me a nice outline of the files I’m working on. This also needs additional packages depending on the languages you work with. I use

  3. One dark theme because it looks nice.

Browser

I use Chrome as the main browser because I really like how solid devTools is. I did make a few changes in the settings. Here’s what my settings look like

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I also have the Ember inspector installed

I have device frames enabled, which is what I use on mobile screenshots I post here.

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I highlighted capture screenshot as well since it’s a very cool feature that I use to get pre-cropped screenshots of what’s in the viewport very easily.

Git Client

I also use GitKraken which gives me a very good overview of everything going on in the Discourse repository and helps me organize my work.

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workflow

I also have a fork of Discourse. My workflow for any change is as follows:

  1. pull latest from Discourse
  2. create a branch
  3. make changes and test them on a few devices (see note below)
  4. commit changes
  5. rebase
  6. send a PR to Discourse master
  7. once merged, I deleted the branch.

Note: in order to test changes on different devices, I keep the Discourse server running on localhost on Ubuntu, connect the other devices to the same network and I’m then able to access my dev install on any device on the network by going to <host-ip-address>:3000

A couple more things I’d like to mention and they’re not really related to developing but at the same time they’re just as important to me.

  1. I use a very comfortable mechanical keyboard and it really adds to the experience
  2. I use the Qugir dark theme for Ubuntu which I find very visually appealing.
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