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.
If you're on OS X, (1) make a case-sensitive disk image using the application called Disk Utility. Open Disk Utility and create a new disk image like here:
Then cd to that disk image, and git clone the EA Forum within that disk image.
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. It may take awhile.
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
You may need to use sudo vim or something to edit it, as it's a readonly file by default.
Start the paster server:
/path/to/eaforum$ vagrant ssh
vagrant@precise64:~$ cd /vagrant/r2
vagrant@precise64:/vagrant/r2$ paster serve --reload development.ini
If you see 2015-07-05 23:00:23 : WSGIServer starting up, that means the server is running -- go to the next step.
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.
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).