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Hacking

Setting Up Development Environment Using Vagrant

Vagrant is a free software command line utility for managing the life cycle of virtual machines. The FreedomBox project provides ready-made virtual machines (VMs) for use with Vagrant. These images make setting up an environment for Plinth development rather simple: You can edit the Plinth source code on your host and immediately see the effects in the running VM. The entire setup is automatic and requires about 4.5 GB of disk space.

  1. Install Vagrant and VirtualBox:

    $ sudo apt-get install virtualbox vagrant

  2. To download, setup, run, and configure a VM for Plinth development using Vagrant, simply execute in your Plinth development folder:

    $ vagrant up

  3. To access Plinth (from host), visit https://localhost:4430/plinth/

  4. Edit the source code in your host machine's Plinth development folder. By default, this folder is shared within the VM, at /vagrant/. To actually reflect the changes in the running VM, run on your host:

    $ vagrant provision

Installing Dependencies

Apart from dependencies listing in INSTALL.md file, Plinth may have additional dependencies required by modules of Plinth. To install these, run:

$ sudo apt install -y $(plinth --list-dependencies)

Manually Setting Up for Development

It is recommended that you use Vagrant to setup your development environment. However, for some reason, you wish setup manually, the following tips will help:

  1. Instead of running "setup.py install" after every source modification, run the following command:

    $ sudo python3 setup.py develop

    This will install the python package in a special development mode. Run it normally. Any updates to the code (and core package data files) do not require re-installation after every modification.

    CherryPy web server also monitors changes to the source files and reloads the server as soon as a file is modified. Hence it is usually sufficient to modify the source and refresh the browser page to see the changes.

  2. Plinth also support running without installing (as much as possible). Simply run it as:

    $ sudo ./run --debug

    In this mode, Plinth runs in working directory without need for installation. It uses the plinth.conf config file in the working directory if no regular config file (/etc/plinth/plinth.conf) is found. It creates all that data and runtime files in data/var/*.

    Note: This mode is supported only in a limited manner. The following are the unknown issues with it:

    1. Help pages are also not built. Run 'make -C doc' manually.

    2. Actions do not work when running as normal user without 'sudo' prefix. You need to add 'actions' directory to be allowed for 'sudo' commands. See data/etc/sudoers.d/plinth for a hint.

Testing Inside a Virtual Machine

  1. Checkout source on the host.

  2. Share the source folder and mount it on virtual machine. This could be done over NFS, SSH-fs or 'Shared Folders' feature on VirtualBox.

  3. Run 'setup.py develop' or 'setup.py install' as described above on guest machine.

  4. Access the guest machine's Plinth web UI from host after setting bridging or NATing for guest virtual machine.

Running Tests

  1. Run tests:

    $ python3 setup.py test

Running the Test Coverage Analysis

  1. Run the coverage tool:

    $ python3 setup.py test_coverage

    Invoking this command generates a binary-format '.coverage' data file in the top-level project directory which is recreated with each run, and writes a set of HTML and other supporting files which comprise the browsable coverage report to the 'plinth/tests/coverage/report' directory. Index.html presents the coverage summary, broken down by module. Data columns can be sorted by clicking on the column header or by using mnemonic hot-keys specified in the keyboard widget in the upper-right corner of the page. Clicking on the name of a particular source file opens a page that displays the contents of that file, with color-coding in the left margin to indicate which statements or branches were executed via the tests (green) and which statements or branches were not executed (red).

Building the Documentation Separately

Plinth man page is built from DocBook source in the doc/ directory. FreedomBox manual is downloaded from the wiki is also available there. Both these are build during the installation process.

  1. To build the documentation separately, run:

    $ make -C doc

Repository

Plinth is available from GitHub.

Bugs & TODO

You can report bugs on Plinth's issue tracker.

For new developers looking to start contributing to the project, this is a good place to pick up a task to work on. Tasks that are labeled as 'beginner' are easy to work on and have a known solution. Also, other developers are ready to guide you on the implementation for such tasks.

Feel free to pickup a task from the issue by announcing it on the issue or by creating a new issue for whatever task you are going to work on.

Submitting Your Changes

Once you have completed implementing the solution, request a merge into the upstream.

Pacthes can be submitted in either of the two ways:

  • Post your patches to the FreedomBox discuss mailing list. Look at Git documention on how to create submittable patches out of your commits and post them to the list.

  • Create a pull request on Github. For information on placing a merge request, consult GitHub documentation.

Coding Practices

Plinth confirms to PEP 8 Python coding standard. Before placing a merge request, you should check your code for errors with flake8 and indent your code with yapf.

Internationalization

Every module should from gettext import gettext as _ and wrap displayed strings with _(). We don't have the language stuff in place yet (we have no translation files), but we need to put the infrastructure in place for it from the start. Use it like this:

log.error(_("Couldn't import %s: %s"), path, e)

Translations

Introduce yourself on #freedombox IRC (irc.debian.org) and start translating the PO file from your language directory from: Plinth/plinth/locale/ Introducing yourself is important since some work may have been done already on Debian translators discussion lists and Weblate localization platform. https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/freedombox/plinth/ https://www.debian.org/MailingLists/subscribe For more information on translations: https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Translate