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Running a Development Copy of Find

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Joseph Lansdowne edited this page Jun 24, 2025 · 15 revisions

Getting Started

So you've made some changes to Find and want to test them. This is the page for you!

For the purposes of this guide, we're assuming that you've already cloned Find from GitHub and installed all of the dependencies. If you haven't, go and follow the steps on the Building Find Wiki page.

Step One: Compile and Install the modules

  • mvn install

It's important to run the install step, as this "installs" the modules to your local Maven repository. This makes the core module available for idol to use as a dependency.

Step Two: Use Spring Boot to run a local server

Find runs on Java 17 or 21.

  • cd into idol.
  • Run mvn spring-boot:run -Didol.find.home=<path_to_find_home_directory>. You will need to create a home directory for Find - have a look at Home-directory.

Any changes you make to Java files will be recompiled and redeployed automatically.

Step Three: Use Grunt to keep HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files up to date

From your idol folder, run the following command:

  • grunt copy-resources

This will take any changes you make to static files (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, etc) in core and deploy them into your running Spring Boot server from step two.

Step Four: Open Find in your web browser

  • Navigate to http://localhost:8080 and you should see Find. A config file has been generated in the Find home directory that you specified on the command line in step two.

Any code changes you make will appear after a short delay (should be less than a couple of seconds) - refresh your browser to pick up client side changes.

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