2. Localhost

Run Weavy on a developer workstation

When developing the integration between your app and Weavy it can often be useful to have a local instance of the Weavy backend on your development machine.

Prerequisites

• Git
• .NET 10 SDK (we also recommend installing Visual Studio with the ASP.NET and web devopment workloads)
• SQL Server 2017 (or later)
• SQL Server Management Studio

Download Weavy

The code is available on GitHub and the repo contains a fully functional ASP.NET MVC Core web application that you can download and build on your local machine.

In a terminal window, run the following command to clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/weavy/weavy-server.git

Instead of cloning, you can also fork the repo. This lets you make changes to the project and allows you to easily fetch updates when we release new versions of Weavy.

Create database

Open SQL Server Management Studio and create a new database (we suggest you call it weavy).

Configure app settings

Create a file named appsettings.json in the src folder. Add settings for database connection string and license as described below:

{
  "ConnectionStrings": {
    "Weavy": "server=localhost;database=weavy;trusted_connection=true;trustservercertificate=true;"
  },
  "Weavy": {
    "License": "YOUR-LICENSE-KEY"
  }
}

Build and run

Once the repo is cloned, the database is created, and the app settings have been configured, you can build and run the application.

Open a terminal window in the src folder and run the following command:

dotnet run

Alternatively, if you have Visual Studio installed, you can also open the weavy-server.slnx file and select "Debug > Start Without Debugging" from the menu (or press Ctrl+F5) to build and run the application.

That should be it. Open a browser and navigate to the endpoint displayed in the console window. If everything worked out you should see the Weavy logo on your screen.

Create admin account

Next step is to create a local admin account for managing Weavy. Go to /admin/account and fill in the form to create an admin account and gain access to the /admin section where you can create API keys, view log files etc.

Publish and deploy

To prepare Weavy for deployment you should run the dotnet publish command. This compiles the app code and copies dependencies, configuration files, static assets, etc. into the bin/Release/{TARGET FRAMEWORK}/publish folder which you can now copy to your web server.

For additional additional steps and details see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deploy.

Troubleshooting

If the application does not start, or if you get an error on startup, the console should contain an error message describing the problem. You can also look at the files in the logs folder. They usually contain valuable information on what went wrong. A common problem is missing or invalid configuration settings.