How to set up your development environment
This section explains how to set up a development environment on your
local machine. At the end of this tutorial, you will be able to follow
the tutorial howto-write-an-exercise.md
. For the moment, only
GNU/Linux and MacOS X are supported.
An alternative to following the instructions below is to use a pre-built Docker container. Assuming you have an exercise repository in directory
$REPOSITORY
(absolute path), and a recent enough version of Docker installed, use:docker version # If this fails, find out how to run Docker, first docker login docker run --rm \ -v $REPOSITORY:/repository:ro \ -v learn-ocaml-sync:/sync \ -p 80:8080 --name learn-ocaml-server \ ocamlsf/learn-ocaml:master
This will start an instance of the learn-ocaml server on port 80 (ignore the message about 8080, this is the port used internally). An example repository can be obtained in the
demo-repository
directory of learn-ocaml.
Software requirements
Please make sure that the following tools are available on your machine: - git (>= 2.00) - make (>= 4) - opam (>= 2.00)
To install opam, please follow the instructions described on the Official OPAM website.
The other dependencies are installed automatically by opam.
Step 0: What we are about to do
We will install in directory $DIR
a fresh copy of learn-ocaml
source tree as well as a source directory into which you will develop
your exercises.
Step 1: Install the learn-ocaml platform locally
We assume that the current directory is $DIR
.
First, clone the current learn-ocaml source tree:
git clone git@github.com:ocaml-sf/learn-ocaml.git && cd learn-ocaml
If you do not have a GitHub account, do instead:
git clone https://github.com/ocaml-sf/learn-ocaml.git && cd learn-ocaml
Get an opam environment (a.k.a "switch") with the learn-ocaml dependencies ready:
opam switch create . --deps-only --locked
opam install opam-installer
eval $(opam env)
(Alternatively, use opam install . --deps-only
to install the dependencies in
your current opam switch, without creating a dedicated one.)
Second, compile and install the platform:
make && make opaminstall
At this point, you should get a working learn-ocaml
program in
your path. Try:
learn-ocaml --help
This should open the manpage of the command-line tool to interact with the platform.
Note for developers: An API documentation could be partially generated with the
make doc
command. Currently, the only two supported modules areTest_lib
andLearnocaml_report
.
Step 2: Set up a work directory
Now, let us go back to $DIR
and create a root for the source tree of exercises:
cd $DIR && cp -fr learn-ocaml/demo-repository my-learn-ocaml-repository
Step 3: Sanity check
Check that your installation works:
learn-ocaml build --repo my-learn-ocaml-repository
learn-ocaml serve
This should output several lines in your terminal ending with:
Starting server on port 8080
At this point, browsing http://localhost:8080
should get you to the
homepage of the learn-ocaml instance that is running on your local
machine.
You are now ready to write your first exercise! Please proceed to the next tutorial How to write exercises?