Development instance from Studio

To launch Bonita UI Builder from Bonita Studio, the docker command must be available from the command line.
On Windows, you can either use Docker Desktop or install Docker CLI from the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and configure an appropriate alias.
You can test the prerequisite by running docker version --format '{{.Server.Version}}' in a PowerShell terminal for Windows or in a regular terminal for other operating systems.
Make sure no firewall is blocking the connection between Bonita UI Builder and Bonita Runtime.

When creating a new Bonita project, you can configure Bonita UI Builder in the wizard.

You can choose to automatically start your preferred UI Tool (UI Builder or legacy UI Designer) when opening the project.
You can disable the tool’s auto-start if you do not use it regularly.

For Bonita UI Builder, select the version you want to use. The UI Proxy version is also needed (currently the same as UI Builder).
"latest" will always use the latest available version, upgrading whenever a new version is available. If you want to stick to a specific version that is more recent than the Studio, you can type it manually.

You can also configure an existing Bonita project with the contextual action "Edit project information…​".

There are two ways to manage version control for a UI Builder application. You can either:

UI Builder built-in Version control with Git is recommended if you are collaborating with others on a same UI Builder application. This facilitates the conflicts resolution process with finer grain artifacts.

However, if you work alone or expect very few conflicts on application JSON files, you can use the Git version control on the Bonita project to keep all your changes in one place.

In this case, you must export your applications to JSON files from the UI Builder interface and commit them to your Bonita project repository. They must be exported all at once, or individually to the app/.settings/org.bonitasoft.studio.common.repository/uib/web_applications folder. You can re-import applications from JSON files in UI Builder with the "Synchronize UI Builder applications" action.

As each application has its own Git repository in UI Builder, you can even choose different strategies for different applications in the same Bonita project.

In this case, you must know which application has its own repository and which one is versioned with the Bonita project. The "Synchronize UI Builder applications" action will not erase UI Builder applications which are already shared with Git.

The toolbar offers a button to launch Bonita UI Builder or Bonita UI Designer.

The latest tool you used during this session is selected.

After UI Builder has started, a browser window opens automatically to access the UI Builder interface.

You can also use the "file" menu to restart UI Builder or make hard reset.

When closing Bonita Studio, the Bonita UI Builder instance is stopped automatically.

Docker containers are deleted whenever the UI Builder instance is stopped. We rely on the image and bound volumes to keep data persistent.

All artefacts to launch Bonita UI Builder are stored in the app/.settings/org.bonitasoft.studio.common.repository/uib folder of the Bonita project. This folder contains: