Building Comentario

This page explains how you can build Comentario frontend (UI) and backend (server) from its source code.

Prerequisites

In order to build Comentario, you’ll need a few tools:

• Go 1.23+
• go-swagger 0.31+
• Node.js 20.x
• Yarn 1.22+

Building frontend

1. Install dependencies: yarn install
2. Generate the API client code: yarn run generate
3. Build the app in:
   • develop mode (with source maps): yarn run build
   • production mode (minified): yarn run build:prod

Building backend

In principle, building the backend is as simple as running:

go generate
go build -o ./build/comentario

But of course, there’s a lot of nuances when it comes to compiling, such as dynamic/static linking, stripping debug info and so on. You can find more details on that in the .gitlab-ci.yml file, which drives the automated build pipeline.

Running Comentario locally

You can easily build and run the backend in one go, provided you have Docker installed; you’ll also need to have its Compose plugin.

Start the comentario server in the end-to-end (e2e) testing mode with:

./scripts/e2e-backend

This will do the following:

• Build the comentario binary
• Build the comentario-e2e.so plugin
• Start a PostgreSQL server in a Docker container
• Start an Nginx HTTP server in a Docker container
• Run the built Comentario server in the e2e-testing mode
• Seed the database with mock data

If everything was successful, the backend will start and connect to the database, then fill it with the seed data.

Administration console

You can open the Comentario administration console at localhost:8080 and use one of the following predefined owner users/passwords:

• ace@comentario.app / test
• king@comentario.app / test
• queen@comentario.app / test
• jack@comentario.app / test

Test site

You can also open a test site with Comentario-driven comments at localhost:8000.

Use one of the following predefined commenter users/passwords:

• one@blog.com / user
• two@blog.com / user