Getting Started

How to get started with development

In order to get started with software development you should first learn a bit about git since you might want to consider forking OpenLabFramework. In any case you will need to clone the repository at some point to create a local copy on your machine.

To do this you would normally just use the command git clone repoName. However, OLF has recently been refactored to use git submodules. A submodule is another git repository that is embedded in a main repository. In our case we have now submodules for each OLF plug-in, e.g. OpenLabBackend, OpenLabStorage, etc. In order to pull the main OLF repository together with all submodules you need the --recursive parameter, e.g.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/NanoCAN/OpenLabFramework.git

Now you have the code, but you also need an up-to-date installation of JDK7 and grails in order to compile it. Please note that grails in general does not support Java 8 yet.

To conveniently install and download several versions of grails using gvmtool is highly recommended. On linux you can use it like this (requires curl being installed):

curl -s get.gvmtool.net | bash

Open a new console, which then should be aware of gvm and install grails. Note that OLF currently only supports grails 2.2.x.

gvm install grails 2.2.5

Now you can cd into the repository's directory and start the app. Note that grails depends on an installed java development kit (JDK). Having a java runtime environment (JRE) installed is NOT sufficient:

grails run-app

During the first run all dependency will be downloaded from maven repositories. This will take quite a while. If everything compiles successfully, grails will start on http://localhost:8080/OpenLabFramework creating a local java file based database with default user (user: admin, password: demo0815). In order to get started with development you might want to set up a real database backend. For this you need to learn how to configure OLF.