Get started dev experience

[kardan]

As new people join to help we encountered issues with getting started with the vagrant environment. First issue is that there is a few different locations for the setting up the dev environment. I guess mostly this is the result of that the wiki is fairly outdated https://github.com/akvo/akvo-rsr/wiki. We need to review what we want to communicate & update. But that is outside the scope of this issue.

Multiple locations

https://github.com/akvo/akvo-rsr/blob/develop/vagrant/README.md (1)
https://github.com/akvo/akvo-rsr/wiki/RSR-Vagrant-Development-Environment (2)
https://github.com/akvo/akvo-rsr/wiki/Build-Akvo-RSR-development-environment (3)

Permissions

There is an issue with that the vagrant box tires to perform operations on the akvo/rsr/static folder during collectstatic (which is a part of provisioning) as the rsr user on the vagrant box. This creates issues if in apps static folder is not very liberal (777). Since some files are generated, examples is .js from .jsx files and .css from .scss they don't automagically get set to 777 from PythonReact & sass-convert.

There is a post_merge hook in git_hooks/ but that is only for when merging new files which is not fixing much :(

Code reloading

At the moment the VM have a process that observes RSR with a aggressive watcher. This process is very resource intensive. We could swap it for http://linux.die.net/man/1/inotifywait. Another thought is that maybe we should rebuild the asset pipeline to get rid of permissions. Then maybe using something like https://facebook.github.io/watchman/ would be a natural thing. The built in dev server that can be started with the scripts/devhelper/manage.sh runserver do already offer code reloading. Maybe that is more natural to use.

local_settings and static/

This came up as a problem but it's a bit unsure. Problem was to get assets to load via static-dev/. But quick review of the setup it might not have been the cause of the problems experienced.

Action points

• Make sure we have one canonical location get started docs
• Fix permissions issue
• Code reloading
• Fix the /static local_con issue

[kardan]

With "static-dir" & compilation on the host computer we can eliminate the very unproductive step of running the management command collectstatic to get new assets.

Running a watcher on the host adds complexity and but is probably unavoidable.
http://travismaynard.com/writing/getting-started-with-gulp

[kardan]

Updated link at (https://github.com/akvo/akvo-rsr/tree/master/docs/RSR%20Developer%20Documentation/Environment%20Setup) to point to /vagrant/README.md