ebrehault/sdidev

Buildout for Substance D SDI development

Buildout for SDI Development

This buildout creates a suitable environment for hacking on the Substance D SDI. It installs a demonstration Substance D application as well as the sources used to compile CSS/JS assets for eventual inclusion into Substance D.

Installing

Check this package out of GitHub (must be a member of the Pylons organization on the Substance D team):

$ git clone [email protected]:Pylons/sdidev.git

Cd into the sdidev directory.

Download virtualenv from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenv and install it into your system Python (2.7+). Once you've installed it, create a virtualenv like so:

$ $PYTHONHOME/bin/virtualenv --no-setuptools .

Where $PYTHONHOME/bin is where your Python installation installs its scripts. This will create a virtualenv within the sdidev directory. The --no-setuptools flag is important to make sure that buildout can use its preferred version of setuptools instead of whatever your system Python has.

After you've succesfully done the above, invoke the buildout via:

$ bin/python bootstrap.py
$ ln -s buildout-withoutaddons.cfg buildout.cfg
$ bin/buildout -U

Warning

The -U flag above is very important. It specifies to buildout that it should ignore the ~/.buildout/default.cfg file, which is often trampled upon by other software in ways that are incompatible with our usage of buildout.

When it's finished, an application named sdidemo and its dependencies (which include Substance D) should have been downloaded and compiled. All required Pyramid and Substance D software should also be installed within the buildout environment.

If the buildout doesn't finish successfully due to a compilation error, make sure you have gcc configured on your system and make sure you have the Python development libraries installed. For Debian-based systems, this means installing the build-essential and python-devel (or perhaps python-dev) packages. For Mac OS X users, this means having XCode Tools installed. Then try again.

You should then be able to run the following commands and visit the running application at http://127.0.0.1:6541 in a browser. You may log in as admin with password admin to the management interface at http://127.0.0.1:6541/manage:

[chrism@oops sdidev]$ bin/supervisord
[chrism@oops sdidev]$ bin/pserve etc/development.ini --reload

Success looks like this:

[chrism@oops sdidev]$ bin/supervisord
[chrism@thinko sdidev]$ bin/pserve etc/development.ini --reload
Starting subprocess with file monitor
2012-03-21 14:47:15,711 INFO  [ZEO.ClientStorage][MainThread] ('localhost', 9993) ClientStorage (pid=20128) created RW/normal for storage: '1'
2012-03-21 14:47:15,713 INFO  [ZEO.cache][MainThread] created temporary cache file '<fdopen>'
2012-03-21 14:47:15,716 INFO  [ZEO.ClientStorage][Connect([(2, ('localhost', 9993))])] ('localhost', 9993) Testing connection <ManagedClientConnection ('127.0.0.1', 9993)>
2012-03-21 14:47:15,718 INFO  [ZEO.zrpc.Connection(C)][('localhost', 9993) zeo client networking thread] (127.0.0.1:9993) received handshake 'Z3101'
2012-03-21 14:47:15,818 INFO  [ZEO.ClientStorage][Connect([(2, ('localhost', 9993))])] ('localhost', 9993) Server authentication protocol None
2012-03-21 14:47:15,819 INFO  [ZEO.ClientStorage][Connect([(2, ('localhost', 9993))])] ('localhost', 9993) Connected to storage: ('localhost', 9993)
2012-03-21 14:47:15,820 INFO  [ZEO.ClientStorage][Connect([(2, ('localhost', 9993))])] ('localhost', 9993) No verification necessary -- empty cache
Starting server in PID 20128.
serving on http://0.0.0.0:6541

The supervisord command starts the ZEO server (and any other required processes, delta the actual Substance D app). The application will not work without the ZEO server running. You can use bin/supervisorctl to get a Supervisor shell to start and stop the ZEO server. The etc/supervisord.conf file contains Supervisor configuration.

The bin/py command within the buildout directory will invoke an interactive Python prompt with all the substanced dependencies available for import.

Log files, pid files, and database files are stored in the var directory.

Installing Node and LESS

To deal with compiling resources, you need both node.js and the LESS compiler installed on your system. On a Ubuntu Linux machine, these can be installed via:

sudo apt-get install npm
sudo npm install -g less

You should wind up with a lessc executable on the path. Version 1.3.1 seems to work to compile things. Version 1.2.1 seemed to fail with a similar error to this one for me less/less.js#906

You can see the version of less you have by doing lessc -v.

Updating Sources

To update checked out source packages, you can either use "git pull" within the source directory (e.g. within src/substanced) or you can use the develop up command from within the buildout directory:

bin/develop up substanced

You can update all checked out packages by using:

bin/develop up

This will work with any package listed in the buildout.cfg [sources] section.

The develop command has other useful options such as activate, deactivate and info. See develop --help for more info. decactivating a source is useful when there's a released version of the source and you'd rather use it than the checked out version.

Updating the Buildout

To update the buildout, run git pull within the buildout root dir, then:

bin/buildout

This will cause all necessary software to be upgraded and installed as per the directions in the buildout.cfg file.

You need to do this whenever you change the buildout.cfg file or add an install_requires dependency to substanced or any other package.

Evolving the Database

When "schema" changes need to be made to persistent objects, it will be required to run the bin/evolve script:

$ bin/evolve --latest etc/development.ini

This will run all required evolution scripts present in the substanced/evolution package (e.g. evolve1.py, etc) and will set the database version to the code version.

The evolution machinery uses the repoze.evolution package.

Walking Up To the System After a Few Days

If you're a developer on the project and you need to get the software and your database data up to date after walking away for a few days, you should do these things:

$ cd sdidev
$ git pull
$ bin/buildout
$ bin/develop up
$ bin/evolve --latest etc/development.ini

This should get you to a place where you're running the most current software versions and it will apply any evolve steps to your development database.

Running Tests

TBD.