Setting up an Activepieces development environment

This page is part of my digital garden. It is more like a notebook entry than a polished blog post. It's a space where I document learnings primarily for my own reference, yet share them in case they benefit others. Unlike my blog posts, these pages are works-in-progress and updated over time. Like tending to a real garden, I periodically refine its content. I welcome suggestions for improvements at dries@buytaert.net.

If you just want to use Activepieces with Drupal on your local development machine, the easiest option is to follow my guide on running Activepieces locally with Docker. That approach allows you to use Activepieces, but you can't make code changes to it.

If you want to contribute to the Drupal Piece integration or create a new Piece, the Docker setup won't work. To develop or modify Pieces, you'll need to set up a full Activepieces development environment, which this note explains.

First, fork the Activepieces repository on GitHub using the UI. Then clone your fork locally:

git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/activepieces.git

Move into the project directory and install all dependencies:

cd activepieces
npm install

After the installation finishes, start your local development instance:

npm start

Open your web browser and go to http://localhost:4200.

Email: dev@ap.com
Password: 12345678

This account is preconfigured so you can start building and testing custom Pieces right away.

The Drupal Piece code lives in ./packages/pieces/community/drupal. When you make changes to the code, they're automatically compiled and hot-reloaded, so you can see your changes immediately without restarting the development server.

To complete your setup, see my guide on connecting Drupal with Activepieces.

Troubleshooting common issues

I've run into a few issues while working with the Activepieces development environment. Here is what usually fixes them.

Start by deleting all caches:

rm -rf node_modules cache dev

This removes node_modules (all installed dependencies), cache (build and runtime caches), and dev (temporary development files).

Activepieces uses Nx, an open source build system for monorepos. If Nx's cache is out of sync, reset it to start with a clean slate for builds and tests:

npx nx reset