Development

Preparations

Before you can get started developing ARSnova you need to make sure the following software is installed to build ARSnova Backend:

Java 8 JDK
Apache Maven 3.x

And additionally if you want to run ARSnova locally:

Apache CouchDB 1.x
Python 2.7
ARSnova Setup Tool

Next, you need to setup an ARSnova configuration file. Create a copy of arsnova.properties.example at /etc/arsnova/arsnova.properties. Afterwards, initialize the database by running the tool.py python script from the Setup Tool.

Building

ARSnova Backend uses Maven for builds and dependency management. You do not need to download any framework or library dependencies - Maven handles this for you.

You can create a web archive (.war file) by running a single command:

$ mvn package

Running

ARSnova builds are setup up to automatically download the Java Servlet container Jetty for development. Run the following command to download the dependencies, and startup the backend with Jetty:

$ mvn jetty:run

After a few seconds the ARSnova API will be accessible at http://localhost:8080/.

You can adjust the amount of debug logging by changing the log levels in log4j-dev.properties. Additionally, you can enable exception messages in API responses by setting the boolean property api.expose-error-messages in arsnova.properties.

Continuous Integration

Our code repositories are located on a GitLab server for internal development. They are automatically mirrored to GitHub on code changes.

Apart from mirroring GitLab CI triggers various jobs to:

check the code quality (static code analysis with SonarQube)
build a web archive
execute unit tests
deploy to our staging/production servers

In addition to GitLab CI for our internal repositories, we use Travis CI which is able to run against merge requests on GitHub. Travis CI only runs unit tests for the backend.

The current build status for the master branch:

for ARSnova Backend
for ARSnova Mobile

Development

Preparations

Building

Running

Continuous Integration

Further Documentation