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Developers Guide

This guide is for DTaaS platform developers. It helps development team members get familiar with the DTaaS project software design, and development processes. Please see developer-specific Slides, Video, and Research paper.

💻 Development Environment

Ideally, developers should work on Ubuntu/Linux Operating System.There is an ongoing effort to bring support for Windows Operating System. But, the development and software installation scripts are still heavily suited to Ubuntu/Linux

Please use the steps given here to install the required software packages.

Ubuntu/Linux

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bash script/env.sh
bash script/configure-git-hooks.sh
bash script/docker.sh

⚠ The docker images are large and are likely to consume about 5GB of bandwidth and 15GB of space. You will have to download the docker images on a really good network.

Windows

Two powershell installation scripts, namely base.ps1 and env.ps1 are available to install the required software packages. But errors might crop up due to missing environment variables. The potential errors are:

  1. npm is not recognized......... in base.ps1.
  2. gem is not recognized......... in env.ps1

If you encounter these errors, remember to include node and ruby installation locations in PATH environment variable (Settings --> search for "system environment variables" --> Advanced --> Environment Variables --> PATH).

The base.ps1 and env.ps1 scripts can be run again after setting the correct PATH environment variable.

Pre-install Nodejs and Ruby Software

Another way to solve the PATH environment problem is to install Nodejs and Ruby software packages before running the powershell scripts.

  1. Install the latest stable version of NodeJS from the official NodeJS website.
  2. Install Ruby from official Ruby website and follow all the defaults during the installation.

Run Scripts

Then, open powershell with administrative priviledges and run the following commands in the given order:

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powershell -F script/base.ps1
powershell -F script/env.ps1
powershell -F script/configure-git-hooks.ps1
powershell -F script/docker.ps1

⚠ The docker images are large and are likely to consume about 5GB of bandwidth and 15GB of space. You will have to download the docker images on a really good network.

git hooks

The git-hooks will ensure that your commits are formatted correctly and that the tests pass before you push the commits to remote repositories.

The project uses pre-commit for managing git hooks. Install git hooks using

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pre-commit install

The git hooks run during pre-commit (git commit) and pre-push (git push) stages. No special flags and options are needed to run these git hooks.

You can also run the git-hooks manually before committing or pushing by using the run commands below. The autoupdate command will set the revisions of the git repos used in the .pre-commit-config.yaml up to date.

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pre-commit run --hook-stage pre-commit # runs format and syntax checks
pre-commit run --hook-stage pre-push   # runs test
pre-commit autoupdate                  # update hooks to latests versions

Be aware that the some tests may take a long time to run. If you want to skip the tests or formatting, you can use the --no-verify flag on git commit or git push. Please use this option with care.

🏗 Development Workflow

To manage collaboration by multiple developers on the software, a development workflow is in place. Each developer should follow these steps:

  1. Fork of the main repository into your github account.
  2. Setup Code Climate and Codecov for your fork. The codecov does not require secret token for public repositories.
  3. Install git-hooks for the project.
  4. Use Fork, Branch, PR workflow.
  5. Work in your fork and open a PR from your working branch to your feature/distributed-demo branch. The PR will run all the github actions, code climate and codecov checks.
  6. Resolve all the issues identified in the previous step.
  7. If you have access to the integration server, try your working branch on the integration server.
  8. Once changes are verified, a PR should be made to the feature/distributed-demo branch of the upstream DTaaS repository.
  9. The PR will be merged after checks by either the project administrators or the maintainers.

Remember that every PR should be meaningful and satisfies a well-defined user story or improve the code quality.

👁 Code Quality

The project code qualities are measured based on:

Code Climate

Code Climate performs static analysis, linting and style checks. Quality checks are performed by codeclimate are to ensure the best possible quality of code to add to our project.

While any new issues introduced in your code would be shown in the PR page itself, to address any specific issue, you can visit the issues or code section of the codeclimate page.

It is highly recommended that any code you add does not introduce new quality issues. If they are introduced, they should be fixed immediately using the appropriate suggestions from Code Climate, or in worst case, adding a ignore flag (To be used with caution).

Codecov

Codecov keeps track of the test coverage for the entire project. For information about testing and workflow related to that, please see the testing page.

Github Actions

The project has multiple github actions defined. All PRs and direct code commits must have successful status on github actions.