Dev: Setup on Windows

The best approach to development on Windows is either to use Docker or a virtualized Linux environment with Docker installed.

If your CPU supports the VT-x extensions (most CPUs since 2010 do), then you can create a virtual Linux environment using, for instance, VirtualBox, and then follow the instructions in Dev: Setup on Linux and OS X using Docker.

Otherwise, this is just notes for now. Working on getting this set up still. Note if you're using Windows Pro you may be able to use the docker setup instructions instead of this doc.

Requirements

Git

This is a basic github requirement, but maybe worth mentioning. Check out the docs at https://help.github.com/articles/set-up-git/ to walk through it.

We request everyone (even direct contributors) fork the main repo and submit work via pull requests. See https://help.github.com/articles/about-pull-requests/ for more info on pull requests if you're not already familiar.

Postgres/Postgis

Install Postgres from https://www.enterprisedb.com/downloads/postgres-postgresql-downloads, 9.3 should do the trick.

Once the main installation is finished, use the "Stack Builder" tool to install the PostGIS bundle (2.2.3 for PostgreSQL 9.3 should work).

Once that's done you need to add the bin directory to your system path (see https://www.howtogeek.com/118594/how-to-edit-your-system-path-for-easy-command-line-access/ for some info on how to edit it). The path you want to add will be something like C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.3\bin

Ruby

Install ruby https://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/ make sure the version is at least the same minor (e.g., 2.2.X) version as what https://github.com/Safecast/safecastapi/blob/master/.ruby-version specifies.

NodeJS

Install https://nodejs.org/en/download/ - rails needs this to compile some javascript code

Final check

Once you have the pieces, open a terminal and ensure you can run basic commands.

git --version
psql --version
ruby --version
node --version

Configuration

DB

Then you'll need to create a database user. You should have a tool called pgAdmin available in your start menu. Use that to add a safecast role with the password also set to safecast and specify it as a superuser.

Gemfile

You may need some gemfile tweaks (to be added)

Then try running bundle. This should set up the gems

Db setup

First copy the windows config over to the main location. Note, please don't check this in. At some point this file will be ignored but for now we just have to live with the outstanding changes.

copy config\database.yml.windows config\database.yml

Next create the databases and load the schema. If you see errors here, check that PostgreSQL and PostGIS are correctly installed and configured as above.

bundle exec rake db:create
bundle exec rake db:structure:load
bundle exec rake db:structure:load RAILS_ENV=test
bundle exec rake db:bootstrap

Running tests

bundle exec rspec spec

Expect to see one failure involving a /tmp path. We'll fix this eventually but unfortunately the test isn't windows-compatible.

Running server

bundle exec rails server

And browse to http://localhost:3000