If you just want to spin up an instance, feel free to skip down to "Before You Start: Setting Up Your Environment." However, if you're brand new, you should familiarize yourself with our structure.

RAMS is based on Sideboard, a custom framework that ties plugins together and runs them as a web app. The "uber" plugin - which is its own repo - is itself a plugin for Sideboard. In general you shouldn't need to worry about Sideboard, but be aware that it has several overrides for built-in Python libraries. It will be automatically included when you install RAMS following the instructions below.

RAMS follows a MVC structure, with CherryPy tying the view and controller together. Every template (in /uber/templates/, excluding the static_views folder) requires a function of the same name in /uber/site_sections.

The entire model is declared in /uber/models.py using the SQLAlchemy ORM. We use PostgreSQL for our database, and Sqitch to create and run database migrations.

Currently, all configuration for the app is defined in four files:

• /uber/configspec.ini declares the static variables and includes in-line explanations of each.
• /development-defaults.ini sets up sane defaults for an example event.
• /development.ini, which is not checked into Git, can be used to override any config option in your local environment.
• /uber/config.py processes these variables and inserts them into a global c object. Config.py also defines dynamic variables and properties, which are also added to the c object.

1. If you are not familiar with using the command-line, we recommend you install a Git management tool. Windows and Mac users can try GitHub for Desktop. For a full IDE with a Git management tool, we recommend PyCharm, which works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
2. Install Docker.

• Linux users should install Docker Machine separately. For Mac and Windows, it will be included with Docker Toolbox.

3. Install Docker Compose. For Windows, you will need to use these unofficial installation instructions.

1. Browse to the directory you want to put your folder structure in.
2. Using your preferred tool, clone the quickstart repo into that directory. The DOS/bash command for this is git clone https://github.com/ramsproject/quickstart.
3. Windows: Open up a DOS prompt in administrator mode. Mac/Linux: Open up a bash prompt.
4. cd into the quickstart directory.
5. Run git clone https://github.com/RAMSProject/rams.git src/uber.
6. Clone any other plugins you are using into src/
7. (Linux only?) Run sudo service docker start.
8. Run sudo docker-compose up -d [TODO: Windows instructions] Note: The -d flag runs this process in the background.
9. Browse to https://localhost/rams
10. Edit the code in src/ using your preferred tool - static files (like HTML) will be updated on-the-fly. Run sudo docker-compose restart web to propagate other changes.

Docker spins up three containers: db for the postgres database, redis for the config database, and web for the application itself. In general, we recommend you do not touch the insides of these containers with docker exec-like commands. Managing them through docker-compose will ensure that your results are reproducible for others.

The basic structure of docker-compose commands is sudo docker-compose COMMAND CONTAINER. If no container is specified, it will run the command against all active containers.

To create a test admin account, curl (or browse to) https://localhost/rams/accounts/insert_test_admin. The test account's name is [email protected] and its password is magfest

To restart the server, run: sudo docker-compose restart web.

To reset the database, run:

# NOTE: Doing this will remove all data from both databases! Use caution, please!
sudo docker-compose stop
sudo docker-compose rm # You will need to confirm this
sudo docker-compose up -d

To check if your server is still running, run: sudo docker-compose ps

To inspect the logs (e.g., to see why the web server crashed), run: sudo docker-compose logs web

To start all stopped services (e.g., after restarting your dev box), run: sudo docker-compose start

If you need to build/change Python or Javascript dependencies you'll have to change requirements.txt or bower.json and manually rebuild the ramsproject/rams container locally using sudo docker-compose build web. Ditto if you're changing something in Sideboard itself. Note: if you don't know if you're doing either of these, you probably aren't.

In rare cases, your containers may not pull all their files properly or may become corrupted. To completely kill your containers and re-pull them, run:

sudo docker stop
sudo docker rm
sudo docker rmi ramsproject/rams # You may need to use the -f flag here
sudo docker-compose up -d

Note: This feature is meant mostly for development. Use it in production with caution.

Once you are ready to deploy your work to a remote server:

1. It is strongly recommended that you commit your current changes to Git before pushing to a remote server.
2. Open a new window (or tab) for DOS or bash.
3. Refer to the Docker Machine list of supported servers to find which command you need. We'll be assuming you use DigitalOcean.
4. Run the following commands:

# Substitute your personal token for the access token and rename "MY-SERVER" anything you want. Don't use underscores, though.
# If you don't use Digital Ocean, please refer to the Docker Machine page for the right create command for you.
docker-machine create --driver digitalocean --digitalocean-access-token=YOUR_TOKEN_HERE MY-SERVER

# Tell docker-compose to talk to our server instead of our local machine.
eval "$(docker-machine env MY-SERVER)"

# The next step uploads your entire src directory to the remote server. It may take some time.
docker-compose -f docker-staging.yml up -d

After those commands have finished, you will be able to interact with your server almost exactly like you interact with your development environment - the only difference is that you do not need sudo access to run docker-compose commands on your server.

To re-deploy a new version of the code to your remote server, run:

docker-compose build web
docker-compose stop web
docker-compose rm web
docker-compose -f docker-staging.yml up -d