This web application, in its child stages, will be a non-functional demo for the knuvu process. However, the project is likely to grow into a full product. As such, we are working to adhere to standards and testing as best as possible.
The initial web server is responsible for:
- Building/Handleing the non-functional front end demo.
In order to contribute to development of knuvu, you'll need to set-up your local environment.
knuvu uses Virtual Machines to maintain environments for developers. In order to make this easy, Vagrant is used on top of Virtualbox.
So, install both Virtualbox and Vagrant by following their automated installers.
Once you clone this repository, change to it, i.e cd code/knuvu/server/ and
run:
vagrant up
Your virtual machine will now be automatically downloaded, installed and configured to run the knuvu web application.
In order to run the web server and interact with the database of the application, you'll need to SSH into the Virtual Machine.
From your project directory, this is simply:
vagrant ssh
You'll then be in the virtual machine shared folder. Any changes you make on your host computer will be instantly reflected into the Virtual Machine's file system.
Initially, and periodically afterwards, you may need to update the gems for the application. From inside the VM, just run:
bundle install
Gems will be updated and installed as necessary.
The first time you provision your VM, you'll need to create a database.
rake db:create
If you receive errors about character encoding at this point, don't panic! This can be fixed easily. From inside the VM run:
sudo su postgres
pg_dropcluster --stop 9.1 main ; pg_createcluster --start --locale en_US.UTF-8 9.1 main
exit
You may also at this point may get an invalid user account error. This just means we need to create a PostgreSQL user. From inside the VM run:
sudo -u postgres createuser -s knuvu_development
sudo -u postgres psql -c "ALTER USER knuvu_development WITH PASSWORD 'knuvu_development'"
Initially, and periodically, you'll need to migrate the database schema.
rake db:migrate
To connect to your PostgreSQL Database do the following from inside the VM.
sudo su postgres
psql
To access the web application outside of the VM, i.e. through a browser, you can easily do this by the following IP and whatever port you are running the application on.
13.37.13.37:3000
As development continues, dependencies are likely to change. The best way to make sure you're up to date is by running a provision.
From outside the VM:
vagrant provision
Inside the VM:
bundle update
VM's and there providers (Virtualbox) can sometimes misbehave.
Your first solution should usually be to restart the VM.
vagrant reload
If that fails, try forcing it to shutdown, then launching it again.
vagrant halt -f
...
vagrant up
It's best not to waste time debugging issues within the VM beyond restarting it. Because the environment is fully reproducible, you can simply destroy the VM and re-provision a new one.
vagrant destroy [-f]
...
vagrant up
If your database is throwing errors when starting your server, you may just need to restart the DB
sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql restart
Sometimes, you need to force the VM to be destroyed with the -f flag.
Once the VM finishes provisioning, you'll have a brand new environment to work from.