Running in a VM

In my (Alasdair's) opinion the easiest way to get this up and running on Windows is to use a Vagrant VM. You'll need to install:

• VirtualBox
• Vagrant

You'll also need to create a file called database.yml in the config directory. This should have the following contents:

development:
  adapter: postgresql
  encoding: unicode
  database: manifesto_development
  pool: 5
  username: vagrant
  password: 

Once that's all ready you can open a Windows command prompt in the root directory of this repository. Then run

vagrant up

This will download & import a VM image that has all the necessary software installed.

Then type vagrant ssh to connect to the box via SSH. If that doesn't work you can connect to it using PuTTY. You'll need to run a few more commands to get everything set up:

• cd /vagrant to navigate to the directory where all the code is. This is a mirror of the Windows directory and will be kept up to date automatically.
• bundle install - this will use a package manager to download all the libraries that we use.
• rake db:setup - this will create the database and all the tables and columns.
• rails server - this will start up the Rails server and make the website available at http://localhost:3000.
• Resque is needed if you want to start populating your database with tweets and mashifestos. You'll need to open another command line window, vagrant ssh into the box and run the command below. You may have to refresh the page a few times before mashifestos start showing up properly.

To stop the Rails server simply type Ctrl+C.

To stop the VM type exit in the ssh command line. This would return you to the Windows command line. Then run vagrant halt.

These are the commands for the initial run. After that you only need to do cd /vagrant, rails server, and the Resque command. After pulling you should run bundle install in case any new packages have been added, and rake db:migrate to apply any db migrations that have been added.

Resque in development

You need to be running a Resque worker for the tweet fetching to work. You can do this with bundle exec env rake resque:work.