running_vcg

Building the applications

From your terminal, open the build_tools directory:

cd ~/code/build_tools

We'll use Vim to create a settings file for our local environment.

If you haven't used Vim before, this may be a strange experience.

First type vim .env.local in your terminal and hit return. This will result in a blank screen.

Next press i to enter insert mode and then type the following line:

ENV_CODE_OVER_TIME_ROOT=/home/<your user name here>/code/varcade_games

Note: This is the 'path' to your code. It's how the build system knows where everything is - make sure this matches the exact path to where you cloned the varcade_games repo.

Then press the esc key and type :wq and hit return

If you did everything exactly as I've written above, there should now be a new file in the build_tools directory called .env.local. This file tells the build scripts where the code is, so it's pretty important.

You should now be able to open this file in VSCode. If you have any issues with Vim you can create the file via VSCode - but it's good to start wrapping your head around Vim now, as it will be useful in the future.

Next we need to install a couple tools for building and running the project:

sudo apt install make
sudo apt install docker-compose

Building Varcade Games

Windows Only

Make sure docker is running (in Windows). Open Docker and open the setting screen to:

Docker > Settings > Resources > WSL Integration > Enable integration with additional distros

Make sure that Ubuntu-20.04 is checked in the Enable integration with additional distros section:

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Back in your terminal, run:

make build

This will kick off a build of the various different applications. This will take a few minutes as all of the dependencies will need to download.

Nearly there!

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Running the applications

All we need to do now is run make start from the Ubuntu terminal.

That will start up all of the applications and you can check their state by running make ps.

If any of the services fail to start, run make start again.

Before we can actually interact with Varcade Games we need to initialize the database.

Run the following command to connect to the game-portal application:

docker exec -it game-portal bash

Next run:

./manage.py migrate

You will see some output like this:

Next run:

./manage.py createsuperuser

You will need to follow a few steps to create your admin user account for managing Varcade Games.

We have one final thing to do - that is set up our local networking environment.

Connecting to Varcade Games

On Windows

Open notepad as administrator.

Then select File > Open and navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\ and open the file called hosts. The directory may appear empty, so be sure to select all files from the drop down at the bottom right that says text files.

Add the following line to the bottom of the file:

127.0.0.1   varcade.local api.varcade.local games.varcade.local matchmaker.varcade.local rps.varcade.local

Save and close notepad.

On Linux / MacOS

Add the following line to the bottom of /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1   varcade.local api.varcade.local games.varcade.local matchmaker.varcade.local rps.varcade.local

The following command will take care of that for you:

echo "127.0.0.1   varcade.local api.varcade.local games.varcade.local matchmaker.varcade.local rps.varcade.local" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

Viewing the site

Now, if you point your browser at localhost:8002 you should arrive at the landing page for Varcade Games.

You can log in with the username and password you entered in the previous step when you ran ./manage.py createsuperuser.

Unfortunately there won't be much to see.

We need to add game...