My SUMO local development environment

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Tags: mozilla, development, webdev, SUMO

Summary

A while back, James wrote about his development environment. I wanted to summarize my approach, and go into a bit more detail about the specific setup you would need to have SUMO work locally. For more information, see also this wiki page.

My LDE: Ubuntu Linux

My LDE is slightly different: I dual boot Windows 7 and Kubuntu 9.10. As of now I'm still a student, and I work on my own machine. There are several reasons I find dual booting a great solution:

  • Best performance while developing. Although less and less of an issue, being in the native OS is always be faster than running a VM.
  • A full powered OS that I can use for other work. I do schoolwork and other contracting work, and sometimes Windows is not an option. Even a VM has its limitations when it comes to certain drivers (one example is audio -- which I needed for a graphics project)
  • Keeps my work and pleasure separate -- having dual boot is basically like having two machines. Typically, when I'm in Linux, I do work, otherwise I'm in Windows to do personal things.

The only downside is some additional wait time for rebooting if you need to switch to the other OS. Since I work on Linux only, I rarely need to switch while working. However, everything works fine for me on Linux -- sound, video, even webcam and VPN (will blog later about all of these).

LAMP

For web development in general, you'll need to have the LAMP stack installed. Fortunately, Ubuntu provides an easy way to do this in one line. From a terminal, run:

sudo tasksel

Select LAMP server from the list, and choose OK (TAB + ENTER). Follow the steps to choose a MySQL password and any other configuration there may be. Once that's done, you should be able to go to http://localhost and see the "It works!" text. Here are some useful paths:

  • Web root: /var/www/
  • Hosts file: /etc/hosts
  • Apache sites: /etc/apache2/sites-available/ and /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/
  • PHP ini: /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
  • MySQL ini: /etc/php5/conf.d/mysql.ini

SUMO setup

What you'll need:

  • LAMP stack -- see above
  • A host (optional) -- see below
  • SSL -- see this guide
  • Sphinx -- see this guide
  • Memcached -- I just install the package and that's enough: sudo apt-get install memcached php5-memcache
  • Virtualbox (optional) -- for testing: sudo apt-get install virtualbox
  • A copy of our database -- you may ask James, Laura or myself for this -- see how, below
  • SVN -- sudo apt-get install subversion
  • Checking out and configuring the SUMO codebase -- see this guide

To set up a SUMO host, I add the entry for it in /etc/hosts. Here is the top of my file:

127.0.0.1   localhost
127.0.1.2   sumo

Then, add the site info to apache. Here's my complete conf file (with SSL), in /etc/apache2/sites-available/sumo:

<VirtualHost 127.0.1.2:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@sumo
    ServerName sumo
    ServerAlias sumo
    DocumentRoot /var/www/trunk/webroot
    <Directory /var/www/trunk/webroot>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
<VirtualHost _default_:443>

    ServerAdmin webmaster@sumo
    ServerName sumo
    ServerAlias sumo
    DocumentRoot /var/www/trunk/webroot
    <Directory /var/www/trunk/webroot>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>
    SSLEngine on
    SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem
</VirtualHost>
</IfModule>

To enable the site, just do this:

cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled
sudo ln -s ../sites-available/sumo

Then, restart apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Testing

For testing, I also use a VM in VirtualBox, running WinXP with multiple IEs. I chose WinXP to save space -- only takes up 3GB. You should allow 4GB just in case you want to install more stuff. Using multiple IEs is not the best, as quirksmode points out, so you may consider running a VM for each IE version you wish to test. However, I haven't experienced that many problems. On WinXP I've also installed Firefox (of course), Chrome, and Opera. On Ubuntu I just use the defaults: Firefox and Konqueror (since I'm running Kubuntu).

Help?

I've tried to cover everything, but of course there may be stuff I missed. If you need additional info, you may leave a comment. To obtain a copy of our database, you can find us on IRC or contact us by email.