This section of the wiki contains information for current and potential members of the Koha Development team.
If you are new to the project, and you are wanting to participate, then this should be a great place to start.
If you intend to become a Koha developer, your first step will most likely be to do a “dev” install, in which Koha runs from its source tree. There are several differences between a dev install and the standard install you may be used to. Being aware of them may save you a lot of time and energy.
During the install, koha will ask you where to install its files. The files in question are the configuration files, docs, logs, etc. It is very important to keep in mind that the koha-httpd.conf file generated by koha asks Apache to write its logs in a file stored in this directory, and not in the standard one.
For example, if you specified the directory /home/foo/koha-dev, then if you get an error when trying to connect to Koha's web interface, you will have to look for logs in /home/foo/koha-dev/var/log, rather in the traditional /var/log/apache2 directory.
One other important thing to know concerns templates. In a dev install, only the english templates are generated by default. If you want to use another language in your install, do the following :
$ cd KOHADIR/misc/translator/
$ ./install-code.pl LANGUAGECODE
where LANGUAGECODE is something like fr-FR for french (see which files are present in the po/ subdirectory to figure out which language codes are vailable).
NOTE: if your Koha interface does not use your newly generated templates, it may very well be a permission problem. So, make sure that the complete Koha source tree is readable by the user used to run the web server, e.g. www-data. In particular, if you have a restrictive umask and changed the permissions before generating the templates for your language, you will have to run chmod again to give the right permissions to the new files.