Setting Up Your Development Environment
Before you begin, make sure you're developing on a case-sensitive filesystem. This is almost certainly the case for Linux users. People developing on OS X should make a case-sensitive disk image using Disk Utility and keep the checkout inside that image. Here's what the congif should look like:
Check out or fork-and-check-out the EA Forum source. Check out the submodules (except config/cap-tasks, which is only relevant for production):
/path/to/lesswrong$ git submodule init
/path/to/lesswrong$ git submodule deinit config/cap-tasks
/path/to/lesswrong$ git submodule update
The Vagrantfile is in the root of the repository. cd there and run vagrant up, then wait a little. You should now have a running VM, but there are still a couple of things left to do:
EA Forum likes to be served from a given domain. Make an entry in /etc/hosts:
127.0.0.1 lesswrong.local
Start the paster server:
/path/to/eaforum$ vagrant ssh
vagrant@precise64:~$ cd /vagrant/r2
vagrant@precise64:/vagrant/r2$ paster serve --reload development.ini
Here's an example of the command history from all the above steps, and the full terminal output from this.
You can now point your browser to http://lesswrong.local:8080 and get sensible-looking pages. If that address doesn't work, try http://lesswrong.local:3000. An admin user has been created with a default password of swordfish.
The various testing methods (unit tests, manual tests, Selenium tests) are all specified in the hacking page.
As you acquaint yourself with the EA Forum source, consider summarizing your insights in this wiki to lower the barrier to contribution from others.
TrikeApps updates the site based on pull requests through GitHub - Peter is handling these at the moment.
- You can see questions and answers with a Less Wrong developer here (note that the deadline has passed for the prize described in the post).