Watch our quick demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zXFJ1lWGN8

Basics

Run make in Project root directory to setup project.

make run to run project.

Piazza uses Twitter usernames to detect admin users. It will email a designated address when it encounters unexpected errors. You should change these values to your Twitter name and email address:

piazza.admins=your-twitter-handle-all-lower-case
piazza.error_email=your-email-address

Installing Play

Download the latest version of Play from Play Framework website. Unzip the archive and add it to your PATH in your .bashrc.

You will also need to declare your application secret in your environment.

export PLAY_SECRET="[some random string longer than 16 characters]"

Also make sure to mark your local environment as a dev environment:

$ play id
[SNIP]
What is the new framework ID (or blank to unset)? dev
OK, the framework ID is now dev

Twitter OAUTH Credentials

Create a Twitter application at https://dev.twitter.com . Once you've done that you need to set the OAUTH key and secret in your local environment.

Add these lines to your .bashrc file:

export TWT_OAUTH_KEY="[TWITTER OAUTH KEY HERE]"
export TWT_OAUTH_SECRET="[TWITTER OAUTH SECRET HERE]"

Salesforce.com OAUTH Credentials

See this guide to setting up AUTH with Salesforce.com. You will need to create a Salesforce.com Developer org and generate OAUTH credentials for a new app. Once you're done with that you will need to update your .bashrc with these credentials:

export SFDC_KEY="[Salesforce.com OAUTH consumer key] "
export SFDC_SECRET="[Salesforce.com OAUTH consumer secret]"
export SFDC_REDIRECT_URI="https://localhost:9443/config"

Setting up PostgreSql

First install PostgreSql. Google for this step, there are many tutorials out there for how to do this on all platforms.

Once postgres is set up you will want to create a user for yourself and create a new DB for piazza.

createuser --superuser `whoami` -U postgres
createdb piazza

Add the following environment variables to your bashrc file:

# Heroku db setup
export DATABASE_URL=postgres://`whoami`@localhost/piazza

Restart your shell so the new environment variables are read.

Update the password for your user within postgres db.

$ psql piazza
piazza=# alter user your_user_name password '';

You should now be able to start your Play app.

memcached (Optional)

Set up memcached to run on port 11211 if you want local memcached support. Play will fallback on a local cache implementation if memcached doesn't exists.

Heroku Environment

Heroku best practices recommend that we use Heroku config values for setting application specific data. This includes secure values such as the Play application secret that we do not want to commit to source control.

We require numerous environment variables to be set, these are listed below. Where applicable necessary Heroku addons are labeled [in brackets].

• PLAY_SECRET: random string that is used as the key for most cypto in Play. Keep this secret. Should be at least 16 chars, preferably much longer.
• DATABASE_URL: postgres DB URL [shared_database]
• MEMCACHE_SERVERS: path to the memcached servers in Heroku [memcached]
• MEMCACHE_USERNAME: memcached username [memcached]
• MEMCACHE_PASSWORD: memcached password [memcached]
• SENDGRID_USERNAME: sendgrid username [sendgrid]
• SENDGRID_PASSWORD: sendgrid password [sendgrid]
• SFDC_KEY: Salesforce.com OAUTH consumer key
• SFDC_SECRET: Salesforce.com OAUTH consumer secret
• SFDC_REDIRECT_URI: Salesforce.com OAUTH redirect URI, should be https://your-app-name.herokuapp/config
• TWT_OAUTH_KEY: Twitter OAUTH consumer key
• TWT_OAUTH_SECRET: Twitter OAUTH consumer secret
• STAGING: if true, only allow admins and staging authorized users to log in

Other Make Targets

We use make targets to manage staging and production deployments. You can read more about our branching strategy here.

make stage

Deploy the staging branch to the staging environment.

You need to first merge the changes you want to push into the staging branch.

make deploy

Deploy the prod branch to the production environment.

You need to first merge the changes you want to push into the prod branch.

This is the production environment so make sure you're not pushing bad code.

make jscompress

Combine all JS files into a single file to be used in production.

make push

Push master branch to GitHub.

make clean

Remove compiled class files.

make superclean

RUN THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Bring the project into the original git checkout state. Will wipe away all untracked files and untracked changes.