Setup of Development environment

Overview and Introduction

All the development tools we use are open source themselves, so developers do not need to spend money to be able to partly or fully join the openPETRA development!

The openPETRA developers in OM work on Windows, but all the tools (including the DB systems) are available on various operating systems (supported on Windows, on a number of Linux distributions and on MacOS), with the exception of the IDE (Integrated Development Environment). A very powerful open source IDE, SharpDevelop, is available only for Windows and this is the IDE we use at OM. Another open source IDE, MonoDevelop, is cross-platform and possibly not that powerful (yet). The openPETRA developers in OM haven't tried using MonoDevelop, but it should work, at least as the C# code editor. We do have a fully-fledged build system which is based on NAnt (similar to Ant, but for .NET and not Java), which is cross-platform and that is what we mostly use for compiling anyways.

Setup by Operating System

Please follow the Link for the operating system of your choice. You are more than welcome to add your own instructions here if the OS of your choice isn't listed here yet and you have found out how to set the development tools up on this OS!

• Setup of Development Environment for Windows
• Setup of Development Environment for Debian
• Setup of Development Environment for Ubuntu
• Setup of Development Environment for OpenSuSE
• Setup of Development Environment for CentOS
• Setup of Development Environment for Mandriva
• Setup of Development Environment for MacOS

Use another database system

By default, the development environment is set up using SQLite as the default database. This is the easiest way to get a quick start. For serious development of OpenPetra, it makes more sense to use either PostgreSQL or MySQL, because eg. they enforce the constraints and therefore coding errors come to light much quicker.

To switch to another database systems, please follow these steps:

• Change your OpenPetra.build.config file, change the value of DBMS.Type. Please enter the password of your database admin user in DBMS.Password.
• delete the file openpetraorg/etc/Server.config, and run nant compilePetraServer, which should copy the right config file
• also run nant recreateDatabase und nant resetDatabase which will create the database and load the base and demo data.

NAnt script

After completing all the steps that are involved in the setup of your development environment on the operating system of your choice, you are ready for the compiling and starting of openPETRA!

We have a central NAnt script that is able to build openPETRA, to generate a lot of code and is able to do all automated tasks in the openPETRA project.

get help

To see the available commands, just run on the command line:

cd openpetraorg
nant help

initial steps

First you need to compile the PetraTools which is a set of programs for creating databases and more:

nant compileCommon
nant compilePetraTools

Now you need to create a database. If you don't change the config file, the SQLite database system will be used.

nant recreateDatabase

Then you want to load the database with base data:

nant resetDatabase

You should compile OpenPetra.org this way:

nant compilePetra

Start the OpenPetra.org Server:

nant startPetraServer

Start the OpenPetra.org client:

nant startPetraClient

With the base database, there is the user demo with password demo that you can use to login to your installation of OpenPetra.org. The user sysadmin with password CHANGEME (capital letters!!) will allow you to create more users, backup the database, etc.

See Basic Tutorial for information what is actually working already.

Stop the OpenPetra.org Server:

nant stopPetraServer

further steps

creating a new project file into an existing solution

To create a new project, there is the NAnt task addProject:

nant addProject -D:solution=Testing.sln -D:path=Testing\CodeGeneration -D:namespace=Tests.CodeGeneration
nant addProject -D:solution=Client.sln -D:namespace=Ict.Petra.Client.MFinance.Gui.Test -D:path=Petra\Client\lib\MFinance\Gui

This will create the project file and AssemblyInfo in the given path, the file name is calculated from the namespace. The project will be added to the solution. Most references to dlls are included already. Don't forget to add the new project file and the AssemblyInfo to git.

At the moment, this only works for NUnit tests (Testing.sln), Client.sln and Server.sln. Shared.sln and the ClientPlugins.sln and ServerPlugins.sln should be supported soon as well.