Quick Start

The OPENCBS server is written in Go and therefore you must have Go installed on your system. If you don't, head to the official Go website to download and install it.

To get started, you need to:

1. Set up the $GOPATH environment variable
2. Build
3. Configure
4. Make sure MS SQL Server allows remote connections
5. Run the server

Setting up $GOPATH

Configuring the Go development environment is pretty much the same as setting up the $GOPATH variable. For an in depth discussion of the topic, check out this article: How to Write Go Code. In the meantime, what follows are the condensed instructions.

If you are on Linux or OS X run these commands:

$ mkdir $HOME/go
$ export GOPATH=$HOME/go
$ export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin

To save the variable accross terminal sessions add these lines into the .bash_profile file:

export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH="$PATH:$GOPATH/bin"

In Windows go to Start, right-click Computer and choose Properties. Open up the Advanced system settings window and click the Environment Variables button. Click New, type GOPATH in the variable name field, and enter a valid path in the variable value field. Close all windows by clicking OK.

Building

Getting and rebuilding source code could not be any easier with Go. Just run this command:

$ go get github.com/OPENCBS/server

This will clone the repository, fetch all the dependencies, and build the project.

The repository resides in $GOPATH/src/github.com/OPENCBS/server. If you want to rebuild it, run these:

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/OPENCBS/server
$ go build .

Configuring

When the server starts it reads the configuration options int the conf.json file. This file does not exist by default, but you can create it by copying from the template:

$ cp conf.sample.json conf.json

The file looks like this:

{
  "Server": {
    "Port": 8080
  },
  "Database": {
    "Host": "localhost\\sqlexpress",
    "Username": "sa",
    "Password": "opencbs",
    "Name": "opencbs"
  }
}

As you see, you can adjust the port that the server will listen on as well as the database connection. Please note that if the database hostname contains a backslash, it has to be escaped by an extra backslash.

Allowing remote connections

Just before running the OPENCBS server, you'll want to verify that the MS SQL Server instance allows remote connections. This involves a couple of steps.

First, if you run MS SQL Server 2008 or 2008 R2 you have to find out if it is upgraded to Service Pack 2. Run this query in the MS SQL Management Studio:

select @@version

If it says "Service Pack 2" then you are good. Otherwise, you have to download and install it.

Second, you need to explicitly allow remote connections to the MS SQL Server instance. A quick search on Google reveales a number of detailed articles on how to do this.

Running

To run the server, execute this command:

$ ./server

If there weren't any issues, the server will start accepting connections. If there were issues, it will display an error message and exit.