[Koha-devel] Development environment ,

[Mark Tompsett]

Greetings,

Git Bash: https://git-scm.com/download/win
This is used to do the git clone of the kohadevbox found here: 
https://github.com/digibib/kohadevbox

VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/
This is what actually ends up running the VM.

Vagrant: https://www.vagrantup.com/
This is what makes the creation, destruction, and building of the VM easier.

1) Install all three.
2) Git clone (I put my stuff in /user/mark/documents/kohadevbox so it is 
easier to find later)
3) Open windows command prompt (I have cygwin installed and weird path 
overlaps seem to cause the process to fail from git bash, need to debug 
further later)
4) Read the instructions!
https://github.com/digibib/kohadevbox/blob/master/README.md
5) Re-read the instructions! (trust me, you probably didn't read it properly 
the first time, like too many users who skim -- I did :( )
6) You are at the "Usage" portion of the instructions.
    Deal with the users.yml file in an editor that doesn't mess up LF vs CR 
LF lines.
    I like notepad++ found at https://notepad-plus-plus.org/download
7) WAIT A LONG TIME!
    -- The vagrant up provisioning now properly triggers ansible on the VM. 
This set up includes a git clone of the Koha repository.

At the end of this process you get a VM which can be accessed with 'vagrant 
ssh' (which I do not like) or something like putty
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html (I used the 
MSI installer, so I get pageant and puttygen easily too)
You will note there is a file (e.g. 
C:\Users\mark\Documents\kohadevbox\.vagrant\machines\jessie\virtualbox\private_key) 
which you can open with putty's puttygen.
Saving the private key from within putty gen gives you a way to use Putty to 
SSH to the VM (127.0.0.1 port 2222) by double clicking the saved .ppk file.
The user name is 'vagrant'.

Once on the VM, you will notice there are lots of directories of installed 
Koha software. Your development area is in /home/vagrant/kohaclone.

One last note while I remember, if you tell it to run plack, staff client 
errors will be in the plack logs, not your expected.
And for simplicity, you might want to type "sudo koha-shell kohadev" as your 
first command.

Perhaps others will correct me, but this is what I have done thus far.

GPML,
Mark Tompsett