Setting up a Development System¶

In order to begin coding on openATTIC, you need to set up a development system, by performing the following steps. The instructions below assume a Debian “Jessie” or Ubuntu “Trusty” Linux environment. The package names and path names likely differ on other Linux distributions.

If you don’t want to bother with performing the following steps manually, take a look at Setting up a Development System with Vagrant, which automates the process of setting up a development environment in a virtual machine to keep it separated from your local system.

Installing the Development Tools¶

openATTIC requires a bunch of tools and software to be installed and configured, which is handled automatically by the Debian packages. While you could of course configure these things manually, doing so would involve a lot of manual work which isn’t really necessary. Set up the system just as described in Installation and Getting Started, but do not yet execute oaconfig install.

We recommend installing a nightly build for development systems, which is based on the latest commit in the default branch.

Set the installed packages on hold to prevent Apt from updating them:
```
# apt-mark hold 'openattic-.*'
```
Install Git:
```
# apt-get install git
```

Install Node.JS and the Node Package Manager npm:

# apt-get install nodejs npm
# ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node

Install Bower and Grunt (to build the Web UI):

# npm install -g bower
# npm install -g grunt-cli

Go to the /srv directory, and create a local clone of your openATTIC fork there, using the current master branch as the basis:
```
# cd /srv
# git clone https://bitbucket.org/<Your user name>/openattic.git
# git checkout master
```
Customize the Apache configuration by editing /etc/apache2/conf-available/openattic.conf:
- Replace the path /usr/share/openattic with /srv/openattic/backend
- Add the following directive:
```
<Directory /srv/openattic>
    Require all granted
</Directory>
```
- Adapt the WSGIScriptAlias paths to your local clone:
```
WSGIScriptAlias /openattic/serverstats /srv/openattic/backend/serverstats.wsgi
WSGIScriptAlias /openattic             /srv/openattic/backend/openattic.wsgi
```
In file /etc/default/openattic, change the OADIR variable to point to the local git clone:
```
OADIR="/srv/openattic/backend"
```
Now build the Web UI:
```
# cd /srv/openattic/webui
# npm install
# bower install --allow-root
# grunt build
```
If you intend to make changes to the web interface, it may be useful to run grunt dev as a background task, which watches the project directory for any changed files and triggers an automatic rebuild of the web interface code (including the jshint output), if required.
Run oaconfig install and start openATTIC by running oaconfig start.

The openATTIC web interface should now be accessible from a local web browser via <http://localhost/openattic/>_ . The default username and password is “openattic”.

You can now start coding by making modifications to the files in /srv/openattic. The openATTIC daemons, GUI and the oaconfig tool will automatically adapt to the new directory and use the code located therein.

See chapters Contributing Code to openATTIC and openATTIC Contributing Guidelines for further details on how to prepare your code contributions for upstream inclusion.

How to get the authentication token for your own user¶

If you like to use the openATTIC TokenAuthentication (Configuring Authentication and Single Sign-On) in your own scripts in order to achieve automatization for example, you need to find out your own authentication token at first.

Here are two examples how you can get your authentication token via the REST API:

Curl:

curl --data "username=username&password=password"
http://<openattic-host>/openattic/api/api-token-auth/

Python requests:

import requests

requests.post("http://<openattic-host>/openattic/api/api-token-auth/",
data={"username": "<username>", "password": "<password>"})

Examples for additional scripts can be found here: