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Development Environment

These notes correspond to the installation lectures on the course web site and have been annotated to reflect changes as of 2017-04-16 to those videos.

Basic Requirements

  • Chrome Browser
  • Firefox Browser
  • Git (os-specific)
  • rbenv (os-specific)
  • ruby (os-specific)
  • PostgreSQL (os-specific)
  • MongoDB (os-specific)
  • Node.js (os-specific)
  • ImageMagick (os-specific)
  • PhantomJS (os-specific)
  • Sublime Text Editor (os-specific)
  • Rails

Much of the installation instructions included here are based on a very complete set of instructions at gorails.com/setup and the other courses in this specialization. Please reference the material on these sites in addition to these course instructions. Both will provide a complementary understanding on what is necessary for the Capstone project.

Note: For students utilizing Windows 10 as his/her development environment, we will not be utilizing the instuctions provided by gorails.com. Those instructions are reliant upong a beta version of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which imposes some integration and compability issues for the Capstone. Instead, we will leverage the complete set of instructions provided in Course 1 plus some updates and extensions.

Install Chrome Browser

The following Google Help page provides detailed information on how to install Chrome for Windows, Mac, and Linux

Install Mozilla/Firefox Browser

Although Mozilla Firefox can be used as a default browser and development, we will be specifically using it as an alternative testing environment. Unfortunately this browser is going through some major release changes and the Selenium test driver has not fully caught up with the latest release. The extended support release (ESR) version should be used -- which is 45.5.0esr at this time.

  1. Download and install Mozilla Firefox ESR

  2. Verify version 45.x.x esr installed by browsing to about:healthreport and looking at the version and update channel under Vital Stats.

    # about:healthreport

Vital Stats

    version45.5.0
    update channelesr
    updates automatic
    • 2017-04-26 Note: Firefox 45 ESR is at version 45.8.0. It is not critical that you install Firefox (we are using it as an alternate browser for testing), but if you do download it the version must be in the 45.x series. Feel free to skip this step if you do not plan to test with Firefox. You can always decide later.
    • 2017-07-17 Note: I found easy access to older versions at [https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/] and happen to install 45.8.0esr. I successfully tested with a later course branch after setting FIREFOX_BINARY_PATH as will be discussed in the testing module. Again -- treat this as an alternate choice. Chrome is good enough.
    • 2018-07-15 Note: I again found easy access to older versions at [https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/] and happen to install 45.9.0esr.

Operating System Specific Instructions

See the following instructions for operating system-specific instructions for various tools.

Install rails gem

Download/install the rails gem used to create a full application server instance.

  1. Install the rails gem using the Ruby gem installer. This will take several minutes, so plan a break while the installation is in progress.

    $ gem install rails -v 4.2.6 --no-ri --no-doc

  2. If you are using rbenv, add the rails commands to the shell using rbenv rehash

    $ rbenv rehash

  3. Verify the version installed

    $ rails -v
Rails 4.2.6

Install the rails-api gem

Download/install the rails-api gem used to create a 'mostly-api' version of the Rails server. This gem is now officially part of Rails in Rails 5. We will use it in this course to demonstrate its purpose and how to re-enable what we need from what it disables by default.

  1. Install the rails-api gem using the Ruby gem installer.

    $ gem install rails-api -v 0.4.0 --no-ri --no-doc
Fetching: railties-5.0.1.gem (100%)
Successfully installed railties-5.0.1
Fetching: rails-api-0.4.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed rails-api-0.4.0
2 gems installed

    2017-07-11: Unfortunately railties 5.0.x will get installed with it.

    $ rails-api -v
Rails 5.0.1

    2017-07-11: Uninstall railties 5.x.x

    $ gem uninstall railties -v 5.0.1
Successfully uninstalled railties-5.0.1

    2018-07-15: Check the first line of "Fetching: railties". On this date the version was 5.1.3.

    $ gem uninstall railties -v 5.x.x
Successfully uninstalled railties-5.x.x

  2. If you are using rbenv, add rails-api commands to the shell using rbenv rehash

    $ rbenv rehash

  3. Verify the rails-api command is accessible and reports version 4.2.6.

    $ rails-api -v
Rails 4.2.6

Install the bundler

This is used to conveniently install gems defined by the Rails Gemfile.

$ gem install bundler --no-ri --no-doc

Summary

That completes the bulk of the software installations for the entire course. Many of the things installed will be used within the module as we develop and deploy a quick end-to-end API application. The remaining items installed will be used in the modules to come. By mentioning them here we have everything we need installed to checkout samples of the solution repository to test our environment.

Early Sanity Check

You can perform an early sanity check on your development environment by following the following build steps.

  1. Clone a copy of the course example

    $ git clone https://github.com/jhu-ep-coursera/capstone_demoapp.git module1

  2. Checkout the tag at the end of module #1 and create a working branch for module 1

    $ cd module1
$ git checkout module2.start
$ git checkout -b module1

  3. Run bundle to download the gems in the Gemfile

    $ bundle

  4. Create the database for both the development and test profiles.

    $ bundle exec rake db:create
    • Note: If you get a permission error with the username set to nil, assign the POSTGRES_USER environment variable to be postgres

  5. Migrate the database schema for the development and test profiles.

    $ bundle exec rake db:migrate
$ bundle exec rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test

  6. Run the unit tests for the example application

    $ bundle exec rake

    You can optionally use later tags in the course, but with each module comes additional complexity -- so you may want to limit how far you test in the future until you are comfortable with your current progres in the course.