Development of working environment

After waiting for about one month, the result of GSOC’13 was announced on 27^th may 2013 and I got selected by Plone for “ReStructured Text Parser for Robot Framework”.

The first part for the project is the development of working environment and learning the basics of open source project which are git and github.

Any opensource project has to be cloned in the system to work upon. This is done by git. This tools is available for almost every operating system. It can perform many other functions like committing to the project, creation of branches, merging the branches and creation of diff based patch. For the windows operating system, it has got both command line and graphic user interface(GUI) options. After the installation of git, it should be configured for the user in the following manner:

Git config - - global user.name”user name”

Git config - - global user.email”user email”

The project can be cloned in the following manner:

Git clone “address of the project “.    For eg

Git clone “ http://github.com/vivekkodu/project_name.git”

Now the next thing is github. It is the online portal to perform the functions of git. This has got buttons to complete these tasks. Any project on this website can be forked to be copied to the user’s account which can be cloned later on. It also has the option of downloading the source code of any project in zip format.

There is one more tool i.e. virtual environment. In any operating environment, a virtual environment separate from other environments can be created for a particular project. In this way any changes can be applies to the working environment of a specific project without affecting other projects.

The whole project is based on python, so pycharm will be used in the entire project as it has got option to create virtual environment and git integration. First of all python and pycharm were installed and git integration was done from setingsàversion controlàgit. Next a virtual environment was created. Now the next part is the installation of packages required for the project. This project needs decorator, distribute, docutil, pip, robotframework, robor framework-selenium2library, robotframeworklexer, selenium. Some of these are automatically installed with the creation of virtual environment. Others can be installed by clicking the install button and selecting the required  packages to be installed. There may be some problems in installing these packages which can be completed in following manners also.

1)Goto working_environment/Scripts, open command prompt and run pip install package_name

2) Download the compressed files of the package, uncompress it, put in the working environment. Put python.exe from installed python folder alongwith the other files of this uncompressed package and run the following command: python setup.py install.

In this way the working environment has been created. 

To test the working environment, an example.robot file has be created and the project has been run to check if the project is working properly in the developed environment.

This completes the basics of the project. Now the next part is the development/modification of ReST Parser.