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Getting Started
Welcome aboard! This introductory path is for OTW Coders, and will get you up to speed with the set of tools and systems that we use. If you have any questions or any of it doesn't work, contact Volunteers & Recruiting to get access to our chat room, and someone can help out.
This is part of the Getting Started tutorial for Ruby on Rails Coders.
(This is a copy of the tutorial available on our internal wiki - that version is more likely to be up to date. Contact Volunteers & Recruiting for access.)
- Getting Started
- Software Overview For Coders
- Setting Up Your Webdev - Mac OS X
- Setting Up Your Webdev - Windows
- Setting Up Your Webdev - Linux
- Testing Your Rails Setup
- Getting Started With Google Code and Git
- Coding Practice: otwtraining Project
- AO3 on Github
- Google Code: an Introduction
- Test Driven Development
- Work On An OTW Project
You should follow the steps of this tutorial in order, since some of the later bits depend on the earlier stuff! We've done our best to break it down and no one piece should be too hard, but there's a bunch of (free!) software to install, so get yourself a drink and a snack, and don't be even a little shy about asking for help! First of all, we also highly recommend the tutorials at Rails for Zombies - they introduce the main concepts of Rails. If you do those first, it will give you a head-start in actual coding, and give you a feel for if you like it or not. Then come back and carry on with this tutorial, or let us know if you'd rather help out with a different area of the OTW. They recommend TryRuby.org, which is in theory a great tutorial, but frequently breaks - let us know if you have problems. If you have trouble reading the default font on TryRuby, we have a Stylish script you can install to improve it. If you want some more tutorials in different learning styles, "Getting to Grips With Ruby and Rails" on our internal wiki has links.
To work on the archive, you will need a computer with:
- A network connection (broadband is nicer but even a relatively slow connection can work if you are patient)
- At least 512MB of RAM (any modern laptop or desktop will have this, but not all netbooks)
- At least 2GB of free hard drive space
Your operating system should be one of:
- Windows 2003, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 (32 and 64-bit).
- Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) or later.
- Linux: Ubuntu 7.10+ or Fedora Core 9+ will be easiest although other versions may work as well.
You will need to have/install the following software:
- A good text editor
- A command-line console program with ssh (Secure Shell) capability
- The Dropbox syncing software
(Don't worry if you don't know what all of these are, we will walk you through installing them, and there are free options available for all of them.)
You will also need a "webdev" or web development setup. This is an account on our servers that lets you run and test your code in a setup very much like the actual setup of the archive. We explain how to get this in the next steps of this tutorial. You will need to have signed up via the Volunteers & Recruiting contact form for this.
(Side note: it is also possible to set up the archive to run on your personal computer as a local copy. However, we don't support this officially anymore because it leads to incompatibilities and therefore headaches. If you want to experiment with setting one up, though, feel free! Our Linux setup or OS-X setup instructions for this may help.)
Onwards to Software Overview For Coders!