Development

Welcome

We are currently looking for volunteers to help develop SoylentNews slashcode. Anyone who is willing is free to help you but we really need good perl devs. Slashcode is based heavily on perl and it is seen throughout the code. There is almost no pages that have sometype of perl code on them. Not to scare away not perl devs, there is plenty of stuff that you can do without touching the code too much.

Our code is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode. Have a look and see if want to contribute. Bugs are also being collected on GitHub and are available here: https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/issues?state=open. Currently we are migrating bugs from out old tracking system so this list is currently incomplete but should be updated soon.

Volunteers should hop onto irc.soylentnews.org and join the #dev channel. Come by and express your interest to paulej72, audioguy or mrcoolbp.

Currently we are undergoing a bit of a reorganization and we hope to have more information available here soon about our short term and long term goals for the code.

Development VM

The Dev VM can be downloaded from http://torrents.soylentnews.org/. This is a vim that is designed to run on VirtualBox. Information and downloads of VirtualBox are available here: http://torrents.soylentnews.org/.

Once you get the VM downloaded and the VirtualBox up and ruining, you will want to do a File:Import Appliance in VirtualBox. This will unpack the VM into you environment. Start up the VM and log in with the username and password of slash.

The VM has port forwarding setup to you local system for ssh and http.

ssh: 8022
http; 1337

For ssh your connection string should be:

ssh slash@127.0.0.1 -p 8022

For websites, apache will use the name localhost instead of 127.0.0.1 so you will need to use:

http://localhost:1337

Apache is turned off in the VM. You will need to turn it on using the command:

apacheclt start

The slash user home directory is in /srv/slashdev/. The slashcode GitHub repository is located in slashcode. This is where you will make changes to the code you want to test. The actual slashcode install is located in slash.

The first thing you should probably do is update the repo to the latest version. cd to slashcode and run git pull.

Now we need to install the new code to slash. Here is a script that will help with that. Create a new file called deployslash.sh in the slash home directory and give chmod it to 755.

deployslash.sh

#! /bin/sh


echo === Install from git repo ===
echo
cd /srv/slashdev/slashcode
make USER=slash GROUP=slash SLASH_PREFIX=/srv/slashdev/slash install

echo
echo
echo === Clean up CSS and install Templates ==
echo
rm -rf /srv/slashdev/slash/site/slashdev/htdocs/*css

/srv/slashdev/slash/bin/symlink-tool -U
/srv/slashdev/slash/bin/template-tool -U

echo
echo
echo === Restart Apache==
echo
/srv/slashdev/apache/bin/apachectl restart

This script will be part of the next version of the Dev VM.

To do simple updates, you would make changes to the files in slashcode and redeploy using the deployslash.sh script.

What if you want to develop code and have it merged into the main repo? In this case you will need to setup your own copy of the repo do do your development work. First if you do not have your own account on GitHub please set one up. Next go to the slashcode site https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode and click on Fork in the upper right. Fork the repo to your user account.

Now on the VM go to slashcode. We will setup your copy of the repo as a remote. Run the commands:

git remote add {name} {url-to-your-GitHub-repo}


get fetch {name}

checkout {name}/master

Redeploy slash and you are working from your own repo. As you may have noticed the primary work is being done on the master branch. You will not need to worry about the other branches of the code for now.

Once you get code you like, and have it committed to your personal fork, you can do a Pull Request, https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests, that will create a ticket for the SoylentNews/slashcode repo to merge your commits to the master branch. After proper testing by the Dev team and other sanity checks, you code will be merged and eventually put on to the production servers.

Just a note: I am new to git, so the above directions are what I have been using. If people have a better method for doing this please feel free to update this page with the new information.