debci - setting up a development environment

Install the dependencies and build dependencies (look at debian/control). You probably also want to install a few other packages:

After having the dependencies installed, the first step is to set up the test environment. To do that, you need to run the following command (which needs root permissions):

$ sudo ./bin/debci-setup

If you run debci right now, it would run the tests for every package in Debian, and you don't want that for a development environment. To restrict debci to a list of packages, create a file named whitelist inside the config directory, containing one package name per line. Here is an example with packages whose tests are pretty fast:

$ cat config/whitelist
ruby-defaults
rubygems-integration
ruby-ffi
rake

You might want to test with other packages, that's fine. Just take into consideration that the more packages you have, the longer debci will take to finish a run.

Now you are ready to actually run debci:

$ ./bin/debci-batch
$ ./bin/debci-generate-index

To visualize the web interface, follow the following steps:

$ make
$ ./tools/server.sh

Now browse to http://localhost:8888/

If you think the web interface looks empty, it is because a single debci run does not provide enough data to work with. You might want to generate some fake data so the web interface will look a lot nicer:

$ ./tools/gen-fake-data.sh

debci web UI development

Starting out

If you are interested in working on the web UI, first make sure that you have a development environment setup and some test data.

The web UI is generated using Ruby and ERB templates. A Debci::HTML object in bin/debci-generate-html generates all of the pages for the web UI by using the templates.

The templates contain HTML and debci Ruby API calls to display information in the interface.

The templates are contained in the lib/debci/html/ directory while the debci Ruby API is contained a directory lower in lib/debci/.

Once you make changes to the templates or other code for the web UI, run the following to regenerate the HTML for the interface:

$ ./bin/debci generate-html

If you make changes to the documentation (HACKING.md, RUBYAPI.md, etc.), run the following to regenerate it:

$ make

With the web interface running, you should see your changes with a refresh of the web page.

NOTE: Try to keep lines under 80 characters in length unless it would cause the code to look weird or less readable.

Implementing new features for the debci web interface

If you are developing a new feature for the debci web UI, make sure that if you develop any new debci Ruby API calls that you add tests for them in the appropriate test file. (e.g. If you add a method to Debci::Repository, make sure that the method has tests in spec/debci/repository_spec.rb)

Running tests on your code

After adding tests for the new method in the appropriate test file, run the following:

$ make spec

This will run all tests using rspec. You should see output similar to the following:

rspec --color
................................................................

Finished in 0.05459 seconds
64 examples, 0 failures

If your code passed the appropriate tests, you will see that there are no failures reported by rspec.