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Installation and quick start instructions

Here is how to install the "BadgeApp" web application, for either a development environment or for deployment. On most systems this is a fairly quick and painless process. We also provide information on how to quickly get started so you can do something.

We provide a simple script that does the work, and we emphasize using widely-used tools designed for the purpose. Our installation approach installs a specific version of Ruby and specific versions of the Ruby gems that BadgeApp uses (including the ones in Rails). The web application is implemented with Ruby on Rails. In development we store data in SQLite; the production system stores the data in Postgres.

Development environment prerequisites

You need a working Internet connection to download everything to install.

You need a Unix-like system. This includes a general-purpose Linux distribution (e.g., Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or SuSE) or MacOS. If you're using Windows, install virtual machine software (such as VirtualBox) and install Linux on a virtual machine. We do not expect Windows to work directly.

Make sure your system has up-to-date packages. For example, on Ubuntu and Debian, run this:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

If you use a virtual machine for development, maximize its memory. It will run in less memory, and in particular the production version uses less. However, we enable many monitoring tools during development and they consume a lot of memory.

Some organizations use an SSL/TLS interception proxy, which intercepts all SSL/TLS traffic. If you must work with those, and you are willing to completely trust that proxy, then you need to download and install that proxy's certificates. E.G., to install them on Ubuntu, when your current directorty has the certificates as .crt files, run this:

# ONLY do this if you have an SSL/TLS interception proxy and are using Ubuntu
sudo bash
ca=/usr/share/ca-certificates
tip=tls-interception-proxy
mkdir -p $ca/$tip
cp *.crt $ca/$tip
cd $ca
ls $tip/* >> /etc/ca-certificates.conf
update-ca-certificates
exit # End "sudo bash"

If you're using MacOS, you need to install Homebrew (it provides the package manager command brew). See http://brew.sh/ for installation instructions. As reported by brew doctor, you should also do the following (if it isn't already there) so that updated programs from brew take precedence:

echo "export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bash_profile  # MacOS brew

You also need a version of git installed. If you don't already have it set up, install it using your system installation tools, e.g., at the command line:

  • sudo apt-get install git (Debian, Ubuntu)
  • yum install git (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, older Fedora)
  • dnf install git (newer Fedora)
  • emerge install git (Gentoo)
  • brew install git (MacOS)

Forking the repo

You'll now need to fork the repo on GitHub. GitHub's instructions on forking a repo describe this in general.

In our case, use your web browser to view https://github.com/coreinfrastructure/best-practices-badge, log in to your account (or create one), and click on the "Fork" button on the top right. On In the right sidebar of your new fork's repository page, click on the "to clipboard" symbol to copy the clone URL for your fork.

Now go back to your system, type git clone, a space, paste the clone URL for your fork, and press Enter to download the fork. Once it's done, change into the newly-created directory:

cd cii-best-practices-badge

Installing the development environment

We provide a simple shell script that should install all the necessary tools and libraries. So at the command line just run:

./install-badge-dev-env

This will automatically create a database and seed it with dummy data (by running "rake db:setup").

If that fails, see the section later on "What does install-badge-dev-env do?" to manually do what it's trying to do. If it doesn't work, patches welcome.

Telling git who you are

The installation will ask you for your full name and email address if git does not already have them set. This is used to set up Git so it will correctly record who you are. Please use your own name and email address.

You can change these later using:

git config --global user.name "YOUR NAME"
git config --global user.email "YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS"

Starting the server locally

Once your development environment is ready, you can run the application with:

rails s

This will automatically set up what it needs to, and then run the web application. You can press control-C at any time to stop it.

Accessing the local server

Now start up your local web browser and have it open "http://localhost:3000". On Linux-like systems, you can do this by running this on a command line:

xdg-open http://localhost:3000

Within the web browser you can click on "sign in" to create a new acount, and "log in" later after you've created an account. You can also create your own projects.

Giving yourself admin privileges

If you're maintaining it locally, you might want to give your account admin privileges. First, note the user id of your account (it's the number after "/users/" in the URL when you display your own profile). You can do this by running this (replacing YOUR_USER_ID with the number):

rails db
UPDATE users SET role = 'admin' where id = YOUR_USER_ID ;

Press control-D to exit "rails db".

Exploring

Users normally interact with the web interface. In some cases you may find it helpful to interact directly with the software and examine its state. There are several easy ways: rails db (SQL), rails console, and "byebug".

For more about how the program is structured, and other hints, see the implementation information.

Rails db

Use "rails db" to interact directly with the database. E.G.:

rails db
SELECT id,name FROM users WHERE id < 5;
SELECT id,name FROM projects WHERE id < 5;

The file "db/schema.rb" describes the database schema.

Rails console

The "rails console" can be a convenient way to access state; it starts a Ruby environment with Rails loaded.

Here is a sample:

rails console

p = Project.new
# Set values for project to evaluate.  We'll examine our own project.
p[:repo_url] = 'https://github.com/coreinfrastructure/best-practices-badge'
p[:homepage_url] = 'https://github.com/coreinfrastructure/best-practices-badge'
# Setup chief to analyze things:
new_chief = Chief.new(p, proc { Octokit::Client.new })
# Ask chief to find probable values:
results = new_chief.autofill
results.keys
results[:name]

byebug

You can insert "byebug" anywhere in the code. When that runs, the program stops and provides an interactive command environment which lets you execute commands (such as showing you various states).

Contributing in general

See CONTRIBUTING.md for information on how to contribute changes.

Deployment instructions

This is designed to be easily deployed simply by doing a "git push" to an appropriate destination.

At this point, a deployment is automatically done to a staging system once it's checked into the repository on the master branch.

See also

See the separate "background" and "criteria" pages for more information.

What does install-badge-dev-env do?

The install-badge-dev-env script tries to install all (missing) tools and libraries. You can re-run it again if something got corrupted.

Installing system tools

First, it tries to automatically detect your system package management tool (e.g., apt-get, yum, dnf, or brew), and then tries to install some key tools if they're not already there:

  • git, to get some of the programs we use. Installing git will also install some libraries such as curl, zlib, openssl, expat, and libiconv.
  • Ruby (version 1.9.3 or newer), to bootstrap installing the Ruby we'll use
  • SQLite3 database system, used in development for data storage
  • C compiler and basic libraries for rebuilding ruby. Install a sane C compiler such as gcc or clang.

See the ruby-build suggested build environment for how to do install the other required components. The script installs gcc.

It then normally installs rbenv. See the rbenv basic github checkout instructions for one approach for installing rbenv. The rbenv tool lets you select a specific version of Ruby, and from there, select specific versions of other libraries. An alternative way to select specific versions is to use rvm, but that approach is not documented here.

It also adds an "upstream" remote so that you can easily track it:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/coreinfrastructure/best-practices-badge.git

Installing the project environment

For development we fix the version of Ruby at the version specified in .ruby-version. Please check that file and use that version in the steps below. We also need to install a number of gems (including the ones in Rails); we will install the versions specified in Gemfile.lock. We will do completely separate per-project Gem installs, to prevent potential interference issues in the development environment. Here's a way to do that. We presume that your current directory is the top directory of the project, aka cii-best-practices-badge.

# Force install Ruby 2.3.1 using rbenv:
rbenv install 2.3.1
rbenv local 2.3.1 # In this directory AND BELOW, use Ruby 2.3.1 instead.

# This makes "bundle ..." use rbenv's version of Ruby:
git clone git://github.com/carsomyr/rbenv-bundler.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/bundler

gem sources --add https://rubygems.org  # Ensure you're getting gems here
gem install bundler  # Install the "bundler" gem package manager.
rbenv rehash
bundle install       # Install gems we use in Gemfile.lock, including Rails
rake db:setup        # Setup database and seed it with dummy data

git integrity

Per a recommendation about git integrity by Eric Myhre, we force git to check the integrity of incoming data using:

git config --global transfer.fsckobjects true
git config --global fetch.fsckobjects true

Consequences of our install approach

Some documents about Rails will tell you to execute "bin/rake" instead of "rake" or to use "bundle exec ..." to execute programs. Using rbenv-bundler (above) eliminates the need for that. While "bundle exec..." or "bin/..." are widely used, they are also extremely error-prone user interfaces; if you forget the prefixes, then it can appear to work yet subtly do the wrong thing. Using rbev-bundler means that the easy way is the correct way. A vitally important way to prevent defects is to make the easy way the correct way.

You can use "bundle outdated" to show the gems that are outdated; be sure to test after updating any gems.

Testing the installer script

It may be useful to occasionally test that our installer script is working as expected. We have a branch set up on GitHub which is configured to do just that, test-dev-install. In order to test the install script, you must have write priveleges to the GitHub git repository. If you do, you can trigger a test by running

rake test_dev_install

This command will merge the current master branch into our test branch while conserving our custom circle.yml for testing our install script and then push these changes to GitHub. This will trigger a CircleCI build which will test the install script.

Uninstalling the Badge app's development environment

In order to completely remove the Badge app, perform the following steps:

  1. Remove the database entries Badge app. This can be done by running "rake db:drop && RAILS_ENV=test rake db:drop"

  2. Remove the cii-best-practices-badge directory. (WARNING: This will remove any and all local branches that have not been pushed to your remote git repository.

  3. (Optional) If you do not use rbenv for any other applications and would like to remove it, you can co so by first removing the directory: $HOME/.rbenv. Finally remove the any lines matching "rbenv" from any shell startup files.

You can find lines matching "rbenv" in shell startup files with the following shell command:

grep rbenv ~/.bashrc ~/.bash_profile ~/.zshrc /etc/profile /etc/profile.d/*

See also

Project participation and interface:

Criteria:

  • criteria.md - Criteria for "passing" badge
  • other.md - Criteria for other badges (silver and gold)

Development processes and security: