Getting started doing development on the DP code can be quite challenging. You can get a copy of the source code quite readily, but creating a system to test any changes gets complicated due to the code dependencies — primarily its tight integration with phpBB.
For a long time now, developers could request an account on our TEST server which has all the prerequisites installed, including a shared database with loaded data. There are a few downside with using the TEST server, however. The primary one being that everyone is using the shared database, significantly limiting the changes that could be made without impacting others. Another downside is that you need internet connectivity to do development work.
Having a way to do development locally on your desktop would be ideal. Installations on modern desktops are almost impossible, however, given our current dependency on magic quotes, a “feature” which has us locked on PHP 5.3, a very archaic version that no modern Linux desktop includes.
Environments like this are a perfect use case for virtual machines. While validating the installation instructions on the recent release I set out to create a DP development VM. This ensured that our instructions could be used to set up a fully-working installation of DP as well as produce a VM that others could use.
The DP development VM is a VMware VM running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with a fully-working installation of DP. It comes pre-loaded with a variety of DP user accounts (proofer, project manager, admin) and even a sample project ready for proofing. The VM is running the R201601 release of DP source directly from the master git repo, so it’s easy to update to newer ‘production’ milestones when they come out. With the included instructions a developer can start doing DP development within minutes of downloading the VM.
I used VMware because it was convenient as I already had Fusion on my Mac and that VMware Player is freely available for Windows and Linux. A better approach would have been VirtualBox1 as it’s freely available for all platforms. Thankfully it should be fairly straightforward to create a VirtualBox VM from the VMware .vmdk (I leave this as an exercise to another developer).
After I had the VM set up and working I discovered vagrant while doing some hacking on OpenLibrary. If I had to create the VM again I would probably go the vagrant route. Although I expect it would take me a lot longer to set up it would significantly improve the development experience.
It’s too early to know if the availability of the development VM will increase the number of developers contributing to DP, but having yet another tool in the development tool-box can’t hurt.
1 Although I feel dirty using VirtualBox because it’s owned by Oracle. Granted, I feel dirty using MySQL for the same reason…
Digital Ramblings 