Local development

This guide will help you set up and run the Infisical platform in local development.

Fork and clone the repo

Fork the repository to your own GitHub account and then clone it to your local device.

Once, you’ve done that, create a new branch:

git checkout -b MY_BRANCH_NAME

Set up environment variables

Start by creating a .env file at the root of the Infisical directory then copy the contents of the file linked here. View all available environment variables and guidance for each.

Starting Infisical for development

We use Docker to spin up all required services for Infisical in local development. If you are unfamiliar with Docker, don’t worry, all you have to do is install Docker for your machine and run the command below to start up the development server.

Start local server

docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up --build --force-recreate

Access local server

Once all the services have spun up, browse to http://localhost:8080.

Local SMTP with Mailhog

The dev Docker Compose includes Mailhog, a local SMTP server that captures all outgoing emails. This is useful for testing email-based flows like user invitations, password resets, and other notifications without sending real emails.

The .env.dev.example file already includes the SMTP variables pre-configured for Mailhog — no extra setup is needed.

Variable	Value
SMTP_HOST	host.docker.internal
SMTP_PORT	1025
SMTP_FROM_ADDRESS	[e-mail]
SMTP_FROM_NAME	Infisical Local
SMTP_REQUIRE_TLS	false
SMTP_USERNAME	[e-mail]
SMTP_PASSWORD	(empty)

To view captured emails, open the Mailhog web UI at http://localhost:8025.

Shutdown local server

# To stop environment use Control+C (on Mac) CTRL+C (on Win) or
docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml down

Starting Infisical docs locally

We use Mintlify for our docs.

Install Mint CLI.

npm i -g mint

or

yarn global add mint

Running the docs

Go to docs directory and run mint dev. This will start up the docs on localhost:3000

# From the root directory
cd docs; mint dev;