Contributing

Universal Dashboard Community Edition as a free, open source platform for developing websites in PowerShell. In this post, we’ll go over some of the fundamentals of contributing to the platform from a source code perspective.

Requirements

To build and run UD in a development environment you will need a couple of prerequisites. Universal Dashboard is built on .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, and React. To build and run the project, you’ll need the following.

• .NET Core 2.0 + SDK

• NodeJS

Building a release version

To build a release version, you can use the build.ps1 script in the root of the src directory.

To build release, use the following command line.

.\build.ps1 -Configuration Release

If you don't want to wait for the help to build, you can use the -NoHelp script to skip building the help.

Build and Running in Debug Mode

To build in debug mode, you can run dotnet build from the src directory.

cd .\src
dotnet build

To host the UI in the webpack dev server, you can run the npm task as follows.

cd .\src\client
npm run dev

The webpack dev server will run on port 10000. You should run your Start-UDDashboard commands on port 10001.

You can check out the integration tests to see how this is done.

Source Code Organization

The source code is two parts. The first part is the PowerShell module. It is in the UniversalDashboard folder. It contains the cmdlets, providers, models and webserver. The JavaScript client portion of Universal Dashboard is stored in the client folder.

- client 
    - app | Contains all the JavaScript React components for Universal Dashboard
- UniversalDashboard
    - Cmdlets | Cmdlets exported from Universal Dashboard
    - Controllers | WebAPI controllers that serve data to the client 
    - Controls | PowerShell controls built on New-UDElement
    - Execution | Execution engine for endpoints
    - Help | Markdown help for cmdlets
    - Models | Objects that are serialized and sent down to the client from the server
    - Server | ASP.NET Server configuration
    - Services | Various services for UD
    - Themes | Themes for UD
    - Utilities | Various utility classes 
- UniversalDashboard.Server | Runs UD as a service and as a console application. Provides IIS support. 
- UniversalDashboard.UITest | Pester tests for Universal Dashboard.