To install dependencies, we recommend using [Chocolatey](https://chocolatey.org/install). Always run Chocolatey in Powershell as an Administrator. Assuming your setup does not include any of our requirements, please run:
Note: all packages default to the latest versions. To specify a version, place `--version <version-number>` after each package. You may also install all packages manually from their websites if you prefer.
If you plan to use [WSL](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install) on your windows development environment, you can configure Docker to WSL integration by following the steps in [Microsoft's WSL Documentation](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/wsl-containers).
Once you have those minimum requirements, check out this [Loom video](https://www.loom.com/share/e7439f058eb44c45af872abe8f8de4a1) that walks through starting up a local development environment for Fleet.
Usually, `make generate` takes the JavaScript code, bundles it into a single bundle via Webpack, and inlines that bundle into a generated Go source file so that all of the frontend code can be statically compiled into the binary. When you build the code after running `make generate`, include all of that JavaScript in the binary.
This makes deploying Fleet a dream since you only have to worry about a single static binary. If you are working on frontend code, it is likely that you don't want to have to manually re-run `make generate` and `make build` every time you edit JavaScript and CSS in order to see your changes in the browser. Instead of running `make generate` to solve this problem, before you build the Fleet binary, run the following command:
Instead of reading the JavaScript from an inline static bundle compiled within the binary, `make generate-dev` will generate a Go source file which reads the frontend code from disk and run Webpack in "watch mode."
Note that when you run `make generate-dev`, Webpack will be watching the JavaScript files that were used to generate the bundle so that the process will be long-lived. Depending on your personal workflow, you might want to run this in a background terminal window.
After you run `make generate-dev`, run `make build` to build the binary, launch the binary and you'll be able to refresh the browser whenever you edit and save frontend code.
It's unnecessary to use Make to build the code, but using Make allows us to account for cross-platform differences more effectively than the `go build` tool when writing automated tooling. Use whichever you prefer.
The following assumes that you already installed [Docker](https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/) and [Docker Compose](https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/) (installed by default with Docker on macOS and Windows).
When the Fleet server is running, the Fleet UI is accessible by default at
[https://localhost:8080](https://localhost:8080).
> Note that `./build/fleet serve --dev` requires the use of `make generate-dev` because the server will not use bundled assets in this mode. (You may see an error mentioning a template not found when visiting the website otherwise.)
By default, Fleet will try to connect to servers running on default ports on `localhost`. Depending on your browser's settings, you may have to click through a security warning.
If you're using the Google Chrome web browser, you can always automatically bypass the security warning. Visit [chrome://flags/#allow-insecure-localhost](chrome://flags/#allow-insecure-localhost) and set the "Allow invalid certificates for resources loaded from localhost." flag to "Enabled."
The Fleet UI is developed with [Typescript](https://www.typescriptlang.org/) using the [React library](https://reactjs.org/docs/getting-started.html) and [SCSS](https://sass-lang.com/) for styling.
The source code can be found in the [frontend](../../frontend/) directory.
You can also run delve in headless mode, which allows you to attach your preferred debugger client and reuse the same session without having to restart the server:
