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Getting Started with Dashboards

This is a tutorial on how to set up your local development environment.

Local Development (VS Code Dev Containers)

This repository follows Compiler’s cross-platform Dev Containers standard to ensure consistent development environments across macOS, Linux, and Windows.

Note

Read our blog post on Dev Containers to learn more about Compiler’s cross-platform development philosophy.

Prerequisites

  1. Docker and Docker Compose running locally (check out Podman for a cross-platform OSS management environment).
  2. Visual Studio Code.
  3. VS Code Dev Containers Extension.

Getting Started

  1. Create and configure your local environment file:
cp .env.example .env

Edit .env to set your desired values. The metabase service will connect to the local postgres service using the MB_DB_TYPE/MB_DB_HOST/MB_DB_DBNAME values from this file.

  1. Open this folder in VS Code.
  2. When prompted, click “Reopen in Container” (or press F1 / Ctrl+Shift+P / Cmd+Shift+P and run Dev Containers: Reopen in Container).
  3. VS Code will build the dev container and launch all three services:
  4. dev: Your development shell containing terraform, gcloud, pre-commit, and Postgres client tools.
  5. postgres: Local PostgreSQL 18 database storing Metabase application state.
  6. metabase: Custom Metabase application (socat bridges Cloud SQL Unix socket to TCP 5432 for prod; connects directly to local postgres for dev) connecting to local postgres. Available at http://localhost:3000.