Gradido

Healthy money for a healthy world

The Gradido model can create global prosperity and peace The Corona crisis has fundamentally changed our world within a very short time. The dominant financial system threatens to fail around the globe, followed by mass insolvencies, record unemployment and abject poverty. Only with a sustainable new monetary system can humanity master these challenges of the 21st century. The Gradido Academy for Bionic Economy has developed such a system.

Find out more about the Project on its Website. It is offering vast resources about the idea. The remaining document will discuss the gradido software only.

Getting Started

We are still in active development, so some things might not work as expected. If you encounter any issues, please feel free to report them via the Issue Tracker. Your feedback is valuable as we continue to build a more sustainable financial system!

Get Gradido to your local machine

Clone the Gradido repository to your local machine.

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

For local development, you can run Gradido with Docker or natively, depending on your preferences and system setup. If you don't have a native MariaDB or MySQL installation, Docker can be used to handle the database as well.

Docker Setup

You can also run Gradido using Docker.

• Development Mode (Hot-Reload):

docker compose up

• Production Build:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml up

This will launch the following services as containers:

Service	Description
gradido	Backend & Frontend (All Modules)
mariadb	MariaDB Database Server
nginx	Webserver acting as a reverse proxy

Nginx Routing Overview

graph TD;
    A[localhost  nginx] -->|/| B[frontend port 3000]
    A -->|/admin| C[Admin UI port 8080]
    A -->|/graphql| D[backend port 4000]

    classDef default fill:#ffdf97,stroke:#333,stroke-width:2px;
    class A,B,C,D default;

Database Setup

Gradido requires a running MariaDB or MySQL database instance. By default, the application expects the following credentials:

• Database name: gradido_community (will be automatically created on startup)
• User: root
• Password: (empty)

You can either run the database natively on your system, or use Docker to spin up the database along with an optional phpMyAdmin interface:

• Run database using Docker:

docker compose up mariadb

• To launch phpMyAdmin along with the database:

docker compose up mariadb phpmyadmin

Once started, phpMyAdmin will be available at: http://localhost:8074

Native Setup

Install all node modules with Bun and Turborepo (globally, for convenience):

bun install
bun install --global turbo@^2

If this does not work, try to use yarn instead

yarn install
yarn global add turbo@^2

• Development Mode (Hot-Reload): Launches Gradido with hot-reloading for fast iteration.

turbo dev

• Production Build: Builds and runs Gradido optimized for production. A deployment script for Hetzner Cloud is available here.

turbo start

More Infos for using turbo

For Windows

docker

The installation of dockers depends on your selected product package from the dockers page. For windows the product docker desktop will be the choice. Please follow the installation instruction of your selected product.

known problems

• In case the docker desktop will not start correctly because of previous docker installations, then please clean the used directories of previous docker installation - C:\Users - before you retry starting docker desktop. For further problems executing docker desktop please take a look in this description "logs and trouble shooting"
• In case your docker desktop installation causes high memory consumption per vmmem process, then please take a look at this description "vmmen process consuming too much memory (Docker Desktop)"

yarn

For the Gradido build process the yarn package manager will be used. Please download and install yarn for windows by following the instructions there.

⚡ Workspaces and Bun Compatibility

The project now uses Workspaces, and work is ongoing to make all modules Bun-compatible. You can currently use bun install, but not all modules are fully Bun-compatible yet.

To install bun, run:

curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash

To install dependencies with Bun:

bun install 

Note that some modules are still not fully compatible with Bun. Therefore, continue using Yarn for development if you run into any issues.

EMFILE: too many open files

With

yarn docker_dev

or also

turbo dev

Many files will be watched by the various services. This can lead to this error: EMFILE: too many open files If increasing ulimit don't help, consider starting only the services on which you are working on in dev mode and the rest in production mode.

For example if you are only working on the frontend, you can start the frontend in dev mode and the rest in production mode:

yarn docker_dev frontend

and in another bash

yarn docker backend admin database nginx --no-deps

or local with turbo

turbo frontend#dev backend#start admin#start --env-mode=loose

Tip: for local setup use a local nginx server with similar config like docker nginx nginx.conf but replace docker image name with localhost

Services defined in this package

• frontend Wallet frontend
• admin Admin interface
• backend GraphQL & Business logic backend
• dht-node DHT Node Discover other Gradido Communities
• dlt-connector DLT Connector (WIP), connect to blockchain
• federation Federation, process incoming requests from another gradido communities
• database Contains EntityORM entities and migration code for database
• mariadb Database server
• config-schema Contains common configuration schemas
• e2e-tests End-to-end tests

Open the wallet

Once you have gradido up and running you can open http://localhost/ and create a new wallet account.

How to release

A release is tagged on Github by its version number and published as github release. This is done automatically when a new version is defined in the package.json and merged into master - furthermore we set all our sub-package-versions to the same version as the main package.json version to make version management as simple as possible. Each release is accompanied with release notes automatically generated from the git log which is available as CHANGELOG.md.

To generate the Changelog and set a new Version you should use the following commands in the main folder

git fetch --all
yarn release

The first command git fetch --all will make sure you have all tags previously defined which is required to generate a correct changelog. The second command yarn release will execute the changelog tool and set version numbers in the main package and sub-packages. It is required to do yarn install before you can use this command. After generating a new version you should commit the changes. This will be the CHANGELOG.md and several package.json files. This commit will be omitted in the changelog.

Note: The Changelog will be regenerated with all tags on release on the external builder tool, but will not be checked in there. The Changelog on the github release will therefore always be correct, on the repo it might be incorrect due to missing tags when executing the yarn release command.

How the different .env work on deploy

Each component (frontend, admin, backend and database) has its own .env file. When running in development with docker and nginx you usually do not have to care about the .env. The defaults are set by the respective config file, found in the src/config/ folder of each component. But if you have a local .env, the defaults set in the config are overwritten by the .env. If you do not use docker, you need the .env in the frontend and admin interface because nginx is not running in order to find the backend.

Each component has a .env.dist file. This file contains all environment variables used by the component and can be used as pattern. If you want to use a local .env, copy the .env.dist and adjust the variables accordingly.

Each component has a .env.template file. These files are very important on deploy. They use COMMUNITY_HOST instead of different urls for different modules because in deploy using nginx is expected for routing incoming request to the correct module

There is one .env.dist in the deployment/bare_metal/ folder. This .env.dist contains all variables used by the components, e.g. unites all .env.dist from the components. On deploy, we copy this .env.dist to .env and set all variables in this new file. The deploy script loads this variables and provides them by the .env.templates of each component, creating an .env for each component (see in deployment/bare_metal/start.sh the envsubst).

To avoid forgetting to update an existing .env in the deployment/bare_metal/ folder when deploying, we have an environment version variable inside the codebase of each component. You should update this version, when environment variables must be changed or added on deploy. The code checks, that the environement version provided by the .env is the one expected by the codebase.

Troubleshooting

Problem	Issue	Solution	Description
docker-compose raises database connection errors	#1062	End ctrl+c and restart the docker-compose up after a successful build	Several Database connection related errors occur in the docker-compose log.
Wallet page is empty	#1063	Accept Cookies and Local Storage in your Browser	The page stays empty when navigating tohttp://localhost/

Useful Links

• Gradido.net

Attributions

Browser compatibility testing with BrowserStack.

License

See the LICENSE file for license rights and limitations (Apache-2.0 license).