[ckan-dev] Developer Environment for Developing CKAN Plugins

Wed Oct 5 10:40:45 UTC 2016

Being a developer on a few custom plugins and maintainer of several online
instances, I'll just share my 2c on this.

I install CKAN from sources locally, and each remote instance i'm working
on is replicated in a dedicated virtualenv in my local dev environment; I
rarely have issues that I cannot reproduce easily locally.
As a development environment, I use JetBrains IDEA (a superset of PyCharm),
and launch CKAN from within IDEA, perfect for step by step debugging and
code exploration.

--p.

On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 8:15 PM, Timothy Giles <timothy.giles at slu.se> wrote:

> I meant to write - you CAN install the programs....
> ------------------------------
> *From:* ckan-dev <ckan-dev-bounces at lists.okfn.org> on behalf of Timothy
> Giles <timothy.giles at slu.se>
> *Sent:* 03 October 2016 08:13 PM
>
> *To:* CKAN Development Discussions
> *Subject:* Re: [ckan-dev] Developer Environment for Developing CKAN
> Plugins
>
>
> Nathan,
>
>
> Its amazing how many people have asked this over the years I have been
> following CKAN, and the lack of assistance in the documentation. Prehaps a
> few of us should put something together, because I wish I knew then what I
> knew now and know that I have lots more to learn!
>
>
> My setup, which I find almost perfect is:
>
>
> 1. Starting with a base install 14.04, I add in openssh server
>
> 2. Then install EasyCKAN (https://github.com/thenets/Easy-CKAN)
>
> 3. From there, I putty (SSH) in to the VM
>
> 4. From putty, I run sudo easyckan server - and this runs ckan in
> development, with debugging (which is fantastic)
>
> 5. I then, on my PC, use FileZilla to SSH in and open various files I want
> to develop or debug with either Eclipse or Notepad++
>
> 6. Once I have saved my changes, Filezilla asks if I want to sync it up to
> vm, which it does. The EasyCKAN debug session automatically reloads if
> there is any python code changes made. This allows live debugging and
> development - with almost no need to restart manually the ckan session
>
>
> You install the programs on the VM (Ubuntu 14.04) and RDP or VNC in to it,
> or use nano, emacs etc... to edit/create python and related code files. But
> the above works for me and has at least doubled the amount of work I can
> get done in a day, from the times I used to paster server....... and need
> to restart that every time I made a code change.
>
>
>
> Hope it helps. EasyCKAN is a must if you are new to all this - do check it
> out. I am trying to add more extensions to the system - but remember you
> can manually install extensions just as you would to a normal development
> type (source) install. It is no different, just saves an awful lot of
> install time.
>
>
> Regards Tim
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* ckan-dev <ckan-dev-bounces at lists.okfn.org> on behalf of Jared
> Smith <jared at highwaythreesolutions.com>
> *Sent:* 03 October 2016 07:13 PM
> *To:* CKAN Development Discussions
> *Subject:* Re: [ckan-dev] Developer Environment for Developing CKAN
> Plugins
>
>
> Hello Nathan,
>
> For my particular environment, I use vagrant, setup using shared folders
> between my machine and the vm. I find this an easy way of sharing the same
> code base that allows me to edit on my machine and run the code in the vm.
>
> For debugging, I haven't tried it at all, I'm not sure how difficult it is
> to setup, so I would also be interested in hearing how other devs have
> setup their env for debugging.
>
> For developing plugins, apart from reading the docs on plugin development,
> I would advise keeping up-to-date with the pylons-to-flask migration. As
> this will affect future plugin development for newer versions of ckan.
> Other then that, the docs should provide all the necessary info for
> developing plugins.
> On 2016-10-03 9:51 AM, Nathan Hook wrote:
>
> Good Day,
>
> We are going to start doing a reasonable amount of development on some
> customization of CKAN via plugins.
>
> Are there any CKAN developer recommendations, hints, tips and/or tricks
> that people use when developing plugins for CKAN?
>
> Things that we are specifically looking for help on are the following:
>
> Recommendations on how to do development in an IDE (like PyCharm) and
> move/deploy our code to a remote Vagrant VM (where we will have development
> instance of ckan running).
>
> How does debugging work in a remote Vagrant VM instance with WSGI? Does
> anyone do remote debugging with an IDE (like PyCharm) and WSGI?
>
> Then in general how do most CKAN developers do their programming? Do they
> use Vi? Do they do development in ckan on their local machine? Do they use
> remote VMs (like with Vagrant/VirtualBox)?
>
> We have tried looking for how anyone does CKAN plugin development and we
> have not been able to find any useful information at this time and any
> friendly recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
>
> I have also posted this same email/post to Stackoverflow:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39779531/developer-
> environment-for-developing-ckan-plugins
>
> Thank you for your time,
>
> Nathan
>
>
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>
> --
> —
> Jared Smith
> Highway Three Solutions Ltd.
> Github: @jrods
>
>
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