Customization

There are several ways to customize Kallithea to your needs depending on what you want to achieve.

HTML/JavaScript/CSS customization

To customize the look-and-feel of the web interface (for example to add a company banner or some JavaScript widget or to tweak the CSS style definitions) you can enter HTML code (possibly with JavaScript and/or CSS) directly via the Admin > Settings > Global > HTML/JavaScript customization block.

Style sheet customization with Less

Kallithea uses Bootstrap 3 and Less for its style definitions. If you want to make some customizations, we recommend to do so by creating a theme.less file. When you create a file named theme.less in directory kallithea/front-end/ inside the Kallithea installation, you can use this file to override the default style. For example, you can use this to override @kallithea-theme-main-color, @kallithea-logo-url or other Bootstrap variables.

After creating the theme.less file, you need to regenerate the CSS files, by running:

kallithea-cli front-end-build --no-install-deps

Behavioral customization: Kallithea extensions

Some behavioral customization can be done in Python using Kallithea extensions, a custom Python file you can create to extend Kallithea functionality.

With extensions it’s possible to add additional mappings for Whoosh indexing and statistics, to add additional code into the push/pull/create/delete repository hooks (for example to send signals to build bots such as Jenkins) and even to monkey-patch certain parts of the Kallithea source code (for example overwrite an entire function, change a global variable, …).

To generate a skeleton extensions package, run:

kallithea-cli extensions-create -c my.ini

This will create an extensions.py file next to the specified ini file. You can find more details inside this file.

For compatibility with previous releases of Kallithea, a directory named rcextensions with a file __init__.py inside of it can also be used. If both an extensions.py file and an rcextensions directory are found, only extensions.py will be loaded. Note that the name rcextensions is deprecated and support for it will be removed in a future release.

Behavioral customization: code changes

As Kallithea is open-source software, you can make any changes you like directly in the source code.

We encourage you to send generic improvements back to the community so that Kallithea can become better. See Contributing to Kallithea for more details.