The Guardian website frontend.

Frontend is a set of Play Framework 2 Scala applications.

To start the play development environment, run the provided sbt011 script in the source tree root. This starts the Play Framework console.

Change to the project of interest using the project <name> command. Then use the compile command to compile the software, test to execute test suites.

Start the Play application locally using run at the console. You can inspect it at http://localhost:9000. Play supports recompilation on browser refresh so you can edit the code in your IDE and F5 refresh to see your changes.

To use in Eclipse, use the eclipsify command. This will create Eclipse project and settings files which can be imported using the Import Existing Project options in Eclipse.

To use in IntelliJ, use the gen-idea command from the. This will create IntelliJ project directories. The source tree can be opened directly as a project in IntelliJ.

Further information on using the Play console is available here.

The available endpoints are listed in conf/routes of each application and typically include:

• /management: Operations support as per standard webapp guidelines. See guardian-management.
• /pages/<path>: Serve the Guardian URL at <path> if supported by this application.
• /assets/<file>: A convenience for DEV machines. Assets are CDNed in PROD and would not be available on DEV.
• /<path>: A synonym for /pages/<path> as a convenience for DEV machines.

Deployment uses the Magenta library.

Invoke sbt011 with a --no-proxy parameter to directly download artifacts.

Vagrant is a tool to "create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments." Vagrant itself is a virtual instance creation and startup tool on top of Oracle VirtualBox which takes care of the virtualisation.

Install the Open Source Edition of VirtualBox and Vagrant itself:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose
wget http://files.vagrantup.com/packages/aafa79fe66db687da265d790d5e67a2a7ec30d92/vagrant_1.0.0_x86_64.deb
sudo dpkg -i vagrant_1.0.0_x86_64.deb

The vagrant instance to use is the one defined in dev/vagrant/frontend_lucid64. There should be a prebuilt version at the following location:

http://devscreen.gudev.gnl/vagrant/frontend_lucid64.box

If this is unreachable, build the package from scratch:

cd dev/vagrant/frontend_lucid64.box
/opt/vagrant/bin/vagrant up
/opt/vagrant/bin/vagrant package --vagrantfile Vagrantfile --include ../manifests
mv package.box frontend_lucid64.box

It is convenient to start the instance in the root of the source tree:

/opt/vagrant/bin/vagrant init frontend http://devscreen.gudev.gnl/vagrants/frontend_article_lucid64.box
/opt/vagrant/bin/vagrant up

As a temporary measure until API key distribution is organised, you will need to copy a useful e.g. /etc/gu/frontend-article.properties. Developers should be able to copy the necessary frontend-article.properties from their dev box proper to the source root and then onto /etc/gu in the virtual instance.

Do not check in frontend-article.properties.

SSH onto the virtual instance, copy frontend-article.properties and start the app:

/opt/vagrant/bin/vagrant ssh
$ cd /vagrant
$ sudo cp frontend-article.properties /etc/gu
$ ./sbt011 run

The instance forwards port 80 on the virtual box to port 8000 on the developer box proper so the application should be available at:

http://localhost:8000

Since Play recompiles on refresh, you should be able to pretty much ignore the instance from this point.

Further documentation notes and useful items can be found in dev.