Home > Developer > Contributors > Local CHEFS Instance Setup

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This document will help developers looking to install CHEFS on their local machines for testing and development. Following this documentation will set up an isolated sandbox CHEFS instance for investigation and research prior to preparing pull requests or code commits.

• Prerequisites
• Setup
• Build

Prerequisites

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An IDIR account is required to access CHEFS.

Request an SSO Integration from the Common Hosted Single Sign-on (CSS) page in order to obtain a resource and secret that will be used for authentication when building CHEFS. View the detailed documentation about requesting the Pathfinder SSO integration.

Ensure that Docker is installed on your local machine. Using Docker allows for a quick CHEFS build on your local machine however this is not how the production environment is hosted.

Setup

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Start by cloning the CHEFS source code onto your local machine and download build_package.zip linked below.

build_package.zip

Unzip the file and move the local.json file such that the CHEFS directory structure follows /common-hosted-form-service/app/config/local.json .The chefs_build directory contains the directory structure and docker file for building CHEFS.

Open realm-export.json located at chefs_build/docker/imports/keycloak and search for XXXXXXXXXXXX. This value must match the clientSecret value in local.json so that the CHEFS API can connect to your Keycloak instance. By default, these are set to be equal and don’t need to be altered.

Navigate to the CSS page, log in with your IDIR, and download the ‘Development’ Installation JSON from your SSO Integration.

Back in the realm-export.json file, search for YYYYYYYYYYYY and replace it with the resource you obtained from the downloaded JSON file. Search for ZZZZZZZZZZZZ and replace it with the secret.

All the files are now configured and you can run Keycloak and PostgreSQL.

Note that realm-export.json is configured with the SSO integration for the “Development” environment, and will only work with the resource and secret from the Development JSON.

Build

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Start Docker, open a terminal in the /chefs_build directory, and run the following command:

docker compose up

This will start up an instance for your Keycloak and PostgreSQL containers. If you don’t want to keep the terminal open, you can append a -d to the end of the command above.

Next, open a terminal in the directory /common-hosted-form-service/app and run the following commands:

npm install
npm run migrate
npm run seed:run
npm run serve

This will start the process for the CHEFS API.

Open another terminal in the directory /common-hosted-form-service/app/frontend and run the following commands:

npm install
npm run serve

This will start the process for the CHEFS front end.