Sandbox Creation

We'll use VirtualBox and Ubuntu 11.10 to create a disposable sandbox for Forge development/testing.

• Download and install VirtualBox for your platform.

• Download a minimal Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit ISO.

• Create a new virtual machine in Virtual Box, selecting Ubuntu (64 bit) as the OS type. The rest of the wizards' defaults are fine.

• When you launch the virtual machine for the first time, you will be prompted to attach your installation media. Browse to the mini.iso that you downloaded earlier.

• After a text-only installation, you may end up with a blank screen and blinking cursor. Press Alt-F1 to switch to the first console.

• Consult available documentation for help installing Ubuntu.

Forge Installation

Before we begin, you'll need the following additional packages in order to work with the Forge source code.

~$ sudo aptitude install git-core subversion python-svn libtidy-0.99-0

You'll also need additional development packages in order to compile some of the modules. Use google for additional PIL/jpeg help.

~$ sudo aptitude install default-jdk python-dev libssl-dev libldap2-dev libsasl2-dev libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev
~$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so /usr/lib

And finally our document-oriented database, MongoDB, and our messaging server, RabbitMQ. Note that RabbitMQ is optional, but will make messages flow faster through our asynchronous processors. By default, rabbitmq is disabled in development.ini.

~$ sudo aptitude install mongodb-server rabbitmq-server

Setting up a virtual python environment

The first step to installing the Forge platform is installing a virtual environment via virtualenv. This helps keep our distribution python installation clean.

~$ sudo aptitude install python-setuptools
~$ sudo easy_install -U virtualenv

Once you have virtualenv installed, you need to create a virtual environment. We'll call our Forge environment 'anvil'.

~$ virtualenv anvil

This gives us a nice, clean environment into which we can install all the forge dependencies. In order to use the virtual environment, you'll need to activate it. You'll need to do this whenever you're working on the Forge codebase so you may want to consider adding it to your ~/.bashrc file.

~$ . anvil/bin/activate

Installing the Forge code and dependencies

Now we can get down to actually getting the Forge code and dependencies downloaded and ready to go.

(anvil)~$ mkdir src
(anvil)~$ cd src
(anvil)~/src$ git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/allura/git.git forge

Although the application setup.py files define a number of dependencies, the requirements.txt files are currently the authoritative source, so we'll use those with pip to make sure the correct versions are installed.

(anvil)~/src$ cd forge
(anvil)~/src/forge$ easy_install pip
(anvil)~/src/forge$ pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

If you want to use RabbitMQ for faster message processing (optional), also pip install 'amqplib' and 'kombu'.

And now to setup each of the Forge applications for development. Because there are quite a few (at last count 15), we'll use a simple shell loop to set them up.

for APP in Allura* Forge* NoWarnings
do
    pushd $APP
    python setup.py develop
    popd
done

Hopefully everything completed without errors. We'll also need to create a place for Forge to store any SCM repositories that a project might create.

for SCM in git svn hg
do
    mkdir -p ~/var/scm/$SCM
    chmod 777 ~/var/scm/$SCM
    sudo ln -s ~/var/scm/$SCM /
done

Initializing the environment

The forge consists of several components, all of which need to be running to have full functionality.

MongoDB database server

Generally set up with its own directory, we'll use ~/var/mongodata to keep our installation localized. We also need to disable the default distribution server.

(anvil)~$ sudo service mongodb stop
(anvil)~$ sudo update-rc.d mongodb remove

(anvil)~$ mkdir -p ~/var/mongodata ~/logs
(anvil)~$ nohup mongod --dbpath ~/var/mongodata > ~/logs/mongodb.log &

SOLR search and indexing server

We have a custom config ready for use.

(anvil)~$ cd ~/src
(anvil)~/src$ wget http://apache.mirrors.tds.net/lucene/solr/1.4.1/apache-solr-1.4.1.tgz
(anvil)~/src$ tar xf apache-solr-1.4.1.tgz
(anvil)~/src$ cd apache-solr-1.4.1/example/
(anvil)~/src/apache-solr-1.4.1/example/$ mkdir -p ~/src/forge/solr_config/conf
(anvil)~/src/apache-solr-1.4.1/example/$ cp solr/conf/solrconfig.xml ~/src/forge/solr_config/conf/
(anvil)~/src/apache-solr-1.4.1/example/$ nohup java -Dsolr.solr.home=$(cd;pwd)/src/forge/solr_config -jar start.jar > ~/logs/solr.log &

RabbitMQ message queue (optional)

We'll need to setup some development users and privileges.

(anvil)~$ sudo rabbitmqctl add_user testuser testpw
(anvil)~$ sudo rabbitmqctl add_vhost testvhost
(anvil)~$ sudo rabbitmqctl set_permissions -p testvhost testuser ""  ".*" ".*"

Forge task processing

Responds to asynchronous task requests.

(anvil)~$ cd ~/src/forge/Allura
(anvil)~/src/forge/Allura$ nohup paster taskd development.ini > ~/logs/taskd.log &

Forge SMTP for inbound mail

Routes messages from email addresses to tools in the forge.

(anvil)~/src/forge/Allura$ nohup paster smtp_server development.ini > ~/logs/smtp.log &

TurboGears application server

In order to initialize the Forge database, you'll need to run the following:

(anvil)~/src/forge/Allura$ paster setup-app development.ini

This shouldn't take too long, but it will start the taskd server doing tons of stuff in the background. It should complete in 5-6 minutes. Once this is done, you can start the application server.

(anvil)~/src/forge/Allura$ nohup paster serve --reload development.ini > ~/logs/tg.log &

And now you should be able to visit the server running on your local machine.
You can log in with username admin1, test-user or root. They all have password "foo". (For more details
on the default data, see bootstrap.py)

Next Steps

Generate the documentation

Forge documentation currently lives in the Allura/docs directory and can be converted to HTML using Sphinx:

(anvil)~$ cd ~/src/forge/Allura/docs
(anvil)~/src/forge/Allura/docs$ easy_install sphinx
(anvil)~/src/forge/Allura/docs$ make html

You will also want to give the test suite a run, to verify there were no problems with the installation.

(anvil)~$ cd ~/src/forge
(anvil)~/src/forge$ export ALLURA_VALIDATION=none
(anvil)~/src/forge$ ./run_tests

Happy hacking!