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

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.

See Basic Tutorial for information what is actually working already.

Stop the OpenPetra.org Server:

nant stopPetraServer

Generate the translation files:

nant translation