Developer Installation

You can either install Girder natively on your machine or inside a virtual machine (VM) with Vagrant.

Virtual Machine

The easiest way to develop for Girder is within a VM using Vagrant. For this, you need Vagrant and VirtualBox. Girder is tested to work seamlessly with Vagrant 2.0 and VirtualBox 5.1.

Once you have those installed, obtain the Girder source code by cloning the Git repository on GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/girder/girder.git
cd girder

Inside of the Girder directory, simply run:

vagrant up
vagrant ssh
girder serve

This creates a VM running Ubuntu 18.04, then automatically installs Girder within it. After it completes, Girder will be up and running at http://localhost:9080/ on the host machine.

The VM is linked to your local Girder directory, so changes made locally will impact the Girder instance running in the VM.

To access the VM, run from the Girder directory:

vagrant ssh

To rebuild the web client:

girder build --dev

For more development documentation, see During Development