WSO web development
WSO's web site is a work in progress. You can always see "the next step" at http://wso.williams.edu:3000, where the latest "stable" (stable being a relative term) version of the next update to the site lives. If you're impatient about the new facebook, or you know web design or Ruby, or if you just want to see how it's done, you're welcome to check out a copy of the code and go to work. This page will tell you how to get started.
Contents
Get a Subversion account
Email root at wso to get an account and password so that you can checkout a copy of the code from our Subversion repository. You'll need this when running any of the svn commands below.
SSH to WSO
If you don't have a WSO account, email root at wso. One of them will hook you up. A WSO account is not your 06abc account. It is the first letter of your first name followed by seven letters of your last name. Once you have an account, go ahead and log in:
Windows: get yourself a copy of Putty. wso.williams.edu is the host.
Mac/Linux: Open up a Terminal or a console, and type
ssh username@wso.williams.edu
where username is your WSO username (remember, not your 06abc OIT id).
Check out the code
Once you've logged in with SSH, you're ready to check out your very own copy of the WSO code. In your home directory, or wherever you'd like to keep your copy of the WSO site, run the following command to use Subversion to check out the code. (Don't forget the dot at the end!) This will spew a whole log of output onto your screen, listing all the files it's checking out. You can replace "wso-devel" with whatever name you want for your local copy of the code.
svn checkout svn://wso.williams.edu/wso-on-rails/trunk wso-devel
Now change directory into the code directory:
cd wso-devel
We need to create a log file for your site so it doesn't complain directly to you.
touch log/development.log
Now your site is ready to run! If you just want to poke around you can do that without starting the server (check out How to transfer files to WSO), but if you want to make changes and see what happens, keep reading.
Start the server
But first you need your own personal port to run it on. Find this by running the following command. You'll want to save the output of this for future reference.
expr 50000 + $UID
To start the server run the following command in the wso-devel directory, replacing your_port with the number we generated above.
/opt/local/bin/ruby script/server -p your_port
If you see something like the following, then you're in business.
=> Booting Mongrel (use 'script/server webrick' to force WEBrick) => Rails application starting on http://0.0.0.0:your_port => Call with -d to detach => Ctrl-C to shutdown server ** Starting Mongrel listening at 0.0.0.0:your_port ** Starting Rails with development environment... ** Rails loaded. ** Loading any Rails specific GemPlugins ** Signals ready. TERM => stop. USR2 => restart. INT => stop (no restart). ** Rails signals registered. HUP => reload (without restart). It might not work well. ** Mongrel available at 0.0.0.0:your_port ** Use CTRL-C to stop.
Before breaking out the champagne, we need to check to see that the server actually works. Unfortunately, you can't just pop open a web browser and surf to your new site. WSO's servers are behind a firewall. The firewall only allows connections on certain ports. Yours is not one of them.
Setting up port forwarding
The way through the firewall is to pretend that the web server is running on your computer and not on WSO. We'll use a technology called port forwarding to send web requests to your machine through an SSH connection to your server on WSO. This is, simply, awesome.
And not too hard.
Mac/Linux
Open up a Terminal on your own machine, and type
ssh -N -p 22 -f -2 -L 8000/127.0.0.1/your_port username@wso.williams.edu
EXCEPT instead of your_port, put the port number that you wrote down, and instead of "username", type your WSO account name. Unfortunately, you'll have to run this command somewhat frequently, since SSH connections close when your computer reboots or goes to sleep (or WSO crashes, or whatever...). To make this a little less tedious, open the file called .bashrc in your home directory on your own machine and add this line:
alias wso8000='ssh -N -p 22 -f -2 -L 8000/127.0.0.1/your_port username@wso.williams.edu'
Again, make the substitutions for your_port and username. Close the Terminal window and open a new one. Now, if you need to establish the connection, just type "wso8000" in a terminal window. You can pick a different alias, of course.
Windows
Putty lets you do port forwarding, too. You can read more about it here:
http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.57/htmldoc/Chapter3.html#S3.5
Here are the settings you'll need:
Source port: 8000 Destination port: (your special port) Destination host: localhost
Try out the server
Open up a browser and go to http://localhost:8000/
The new facebook will be at http://localhost:8000/facebook and organizations at http://localhost:8000/organizations
Of course, if it doesn't work, please describe your problem on Talk:WSO web development.
Now, you can change a file in wso-devel, and the change will show up on your development server at this address the next time you reload the page in your browser. Sweet.
Making changes
Nice work getting this far. So now you actually want to do something with the code. For now, come to a WSO meeting Thursdays at 10:30pm in the vicinity of TCL 217a, or email wso-staff@wso.williams.edu with questions/interest. With the new Facebook nearing completion, our next big prospect is rewriting old PageKit services (Factrak, Jobs, RideBoard) in Ruby on Rails.
It's a good idea to run an update every so often so that your local working copy picks up changes that other people have made. Change directory into your wso-devel directory and run
svn update
Email root at wso if you'd like to change the WSO site, add a new service, or fix a bug. If you get the go-ahead, you're in good shape, so go to work. Once you think your change is ready for the world, you'll need to get permission to add your changes to our code repository, where it will be tested and deployed. Email root at wso about that. They'll take care of you.