Binder

Binder is a Spring Carnival management application built for Carnegie Mellon Spring Carnival using Ruby on Rails. Binder is used by Spring Carnival Committee and booth building organizations to do things including tracking build progress, managing tool checkouts, selling building supplies, assessing fines/charges, and supervising student shifts.

Carnegie Mellon's Spring Carnival Committee hosts two live instances of Binder:

• Production (https://binder.springcarnival.org) - This environment is the production environment used to manage Spring Carnival and contains real data. Do not deploy changes to this instance without first testing in the staging instance.
• Staging (https://binder-dev.springcarnival.org) - This environment is identical to the production environment but contains fake data. This environment is used to test changes in a production-like environment before deploying them to the production instance.

Setting up a development environment

To work on and contribute to Binder, you will need to run Binder in a local development environment.

For active binder developers and binder admins:

1. Create a new branch with a good short name about what you're developing
2. Clone your branched repository to your local machine
3. Have or install rvm*, sqlite, npm
4. MacOS/Linux: Change into the binder directory (cd binder) and rvm will yip at you to install the version of ruby found in .ruby-version and a gemset in .ruby-gemset. Read the output.
5. Windows: You also need the version of ruby from .ruby-version
6. Run bin/setup multiple times until it finishes successfully. It will tell you when you've finished.
7. Run bin/rails s and start the rails server.
8. Open a browser and go to the URL provided in the server output (usually http://localhost:3000)

*rbenv is also fine, but adjust directions accordingly

Things you should do regularly

1. Sync your branch. A lot.
2. Lint your code e.g.: rails lint:file:app/controllers/tools_controller.rb Linting is available for css, js, html, html.erb, rake, rb, & yml files.

Submitting Changes

Make changes to binder by submitting PRs reasonably often. The longer you go without doing it, the more difficult it is to incorporate your code back into the main branch. So if you have created a reasonable nugget, even if it is an intermediate step in a bigger project (e.g.: You made some test fixtures), make a PR. Now folks can see what you're up to, talk to you if there will be a potential upcoming conflict, etc. Don't submit broken code; test it first. Lint your code before submitting a PR.

Deploying Binder (normal humans stop here)

Capistrano is used to deploy Binder to the staging and production instances. Capistrano deployment updates the staging or production environment to a specified revision from the Binder repository.

Do not deploy changes to the production instance without first testing in the staging instance.

To deploy Binder to the staging or production instance, run the following command in the Binder repository directory (where <environment> is either staging or production:

cap <environment> deploy

By default, Capistrano deploys Binder from the master branch. However, when testing new features or improvements we often want to deploy from a different branch. To deploy from a specified branch, run the following command (where <branch> is replaced with the name of the branch to deploy from):

cap <environment> deploy branch=<branch>

To list all available Capistrano tasks, run the following command in the Binder repository directory:
Cap tasks listed in /config/deploy.rb

cap -T