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Setting up a development version
To start developing W3ACT, you need to set up a local development environment. First, you need access to the code:
- Set up a GitHub account
- Ask for access to the https://github.com/ukwa/w3act repository (or make your own fork)
- Clone the repository locally
W3ACT uses Play version 2.3.x, and you'll need to set up a local installation along with Oracle Java 8. If you've not used the Play Framework before, you can follow the 'Getting Started' section of the Play 2.3.x manual
Before running the W3ACT code with the play framework, you should provide the proxy settings. For example, at a BASH prompt:
export HTTP_PROXY=http://explorer.bl.uk:3127
export HTTPS_PROXY=https://explorer.bl.uk:3127
From version 2.3.x play framework uses the activator command. Once you're comfortable with invoking the play application, you should be able to start to run W3ACT locally.
activator run
Currently, this also requires a local PostgreSQL database, but you can use a dev configuration file and use the H2 in-memory DB instead along with some dummy data from the conf/accounts.yml file (which specifies a username and password you can access the application with).
activator -Dconfig.file=conf/dev.conf run
At this point, you should be able to make minor bug changes and test them locally.
You can generate or update the project files for Eclipse as follows:
activator -Dconfig.file=conf/dev.conf eclipse
...but note that if you make large changes, like adding a controller, you'll need to rerun this and refresh Eclipse to pick up the new classes/routes/etc.
You should be able to import the w3act folder into Eclipse directly from the file system. Checkout it out of GitHub from inside Eclipse should also work.
You can look at the README and the wiki. However, some of the documentation is out of date, so please get in touch if the information you are seeing does not make sense.
We use the GitHub issue tracker, with a series of milestones which are usually managed by Gil Hoggarth.
Note that there are two versions of W3ACT under development - the production 1.x.x branch and the newer 2.x.x 'Document Harvester' branch. The latter is being developed as part of the CP15 project, and will extend W3ACT to watch websites for changes and allow documents from those sites to be catalogued individually. This is important to bear in mind as any data model changes or major code changes need to be coordinated across the two development groups.
For each issue, we create a new branch that contains the fixes. This can be initially developed and tested separately, and them merged into master for final testing.
It's possible to use a Python command-line tool to submit data to W3ACT for testing. See here