Preface

This document is part of the LiveSupport project, Copyright © 2004 Media Development Loan Fund, under the GNU GPL.

Scope

This document describes how to set up the LiveSupport development environment.

Introduction

LiveSupport uses a well-defined development environment. Most of the LiveSupport-specific files are included in the version control system, but some preparation and setup has to be made on system used to develop LiveSupport as well.

Steps

The following steps needed to be taken for setting up the LiveSupport development environment.

Install development tools

Install all the tools needed for the development of LiveSupport. Please see the development tools document for a list of tools needed.

Set up additional system resources

The LiveSupport development environment uses some system resources, that are not reasonable to include in the environment itself.

Test database

One such resource is an ODBC datasource to a test database. This database has to be accessible for executing the test suites and applications within the LiveSupport development environment.

First, LiveSupport expects a PostgreSQL database, and an ODBC Data Source accessible to it through unixODBC. Please refer to the documentation of these tools to set them up.

The test environment assumes that it can connect to the PostgreSQL database as localhost via a TCP/IP connection, as the user test. To achieve this access, please make sure to edit postgresql.conf (usually /var/lib/postgres/data/postgresql.conf), to have to following line:

tcpip_socket = true

and also edit pg_hba.conf (usually /var/lib/postgres/data/pg_hba.conf) to include the following line, before other lines related to access through localhost:

host    all         all         127.0.0.1         255.255.255.255   password

After the above two manual edits to the PostgreSQL configuration, execute the script livesupport/bin/setup_test_db.sh , as root to create the required database user, database and ODBC datasource.

Web server

Second, LiveSupport expects:

Check out the sources

The LiveSupport development directory tree can be accessed via anonymous CVS, using the CVSROOT :pserver:anonymous@netfinity-5.mdlf.org:/home/cvs. The repository is called livesupport, thus the following CVS command would check out the development tree:

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@netfinity-5.mdlf.org:/home/cvs checkout livesupport

This will check out and create the LiveSupport development directory structure.

Set up tools

LiveSupport uses widely available tools for development, like the GNU C++ compiler, but also uses more specific tools. As these tools, or the exact versions of these tools are not expected to be installed on the development system, the LiveSupport development environment contains them. The tools are installed into the livesupport/usr directory, as described in the directory structure document.

Moreover, some components in livesupport have to be set up prior to compilation, for example running autoconf or similar configuration programs. This ensures that the components compile fine on the development system.

To achieve all these goals, invoke the target setup in the main Makefile, at the root of the LiveSupport directory structure, by issuing the following command in the livesupport directory:

cd livesupport
make setup

The execution of this command will take a while, as all the supporting libraries and tools are compiled and installed to the livesupport/usr directory. Please note that nothing is installed outside of the LiveSupport directory structure.

Personalize your LiveSupport development environment

The LiveSupport development environment can be run in two ways: either only one developer actively doing LiveSupport development on the system, or multiple developers sharing a system for LiveSupport development. In the former case, only one database instance, scheduler daemon and apache (XML-RPC and HTTP/HTML) entry point is needed. In the latter case, each user will have their own database instance, scheduler daemon and apache entry points.

Only one developer doing development on the system

If only one developer is doing development on the system, there is no need to personalize the resources used by the development environment. The following resources are expected on the system.

LiveSupport expects an ODBC Data Source with the following parameters:
This data source should point to a PostgreSQL instance of the same name. Only one developer at the time should access this datasource, as the test suites regularly create and destroy database tables.

The scheduler daemon will use the port 3344.

Please, check settings in var/conf.php files in both storageServer and archiveServer modules and create two symlinks with name corresponding to 'URL configuration' part of var/conf.php files - example for default values: Please make <livesupport-cvs>/modules/htmlUI/var/templates_c/ and <livesupport-cvs>/modules/htmlUI/var/html/img/ writable for apache.

Multiple developers doing development on the system

In case multiple developers are sharing a system for LiveSupport development, each resource has to be personalized. Please run the livesupport/bin/user_setup_db.sh script as root to make the appropriate steps for personalization. The script expects the name of the user as a mandatory parameter, e.g. invoke as:

cd livesupport
./bin/user_setup_db.sh --user ls_developer_user

The script will set up the following resources:
After running the above script, the livesupport development environment for the specified user will be unique on the system, and will not conflict with resources used by other developers. For example, the LiveSupport HTML user interface for the user will be reachable at:

http://localhost/~ls_developer_user/livesupport/htmlUI/var

Ready to roll

With the above steps completed, the LiveSupport modules and products are ready to be compiled and developed further. Have fun!