This documentation is out of date, as it refers to lithium that we no longer use

QuickCode Cobalt

Cobalt is a QuickCode service where people can run code on the internet in a sandboxed environment.

Dependencies

5 git repositories are needed (cobalt, lithium, swops, swops-secret). They should be cloned side-by-side.

git clone [email protected]:scraperwiki/swops-secret.git
git clone [email protected]:scraperwiki/lithium.git
git clone [email protected]:scraperwiki/cobalt.git
git clone [email protected]:scraperwiki/swops.git

You can do this from a directory that isn't your home directory, but you'll need to symlink the keyfile in swops-secret and set permissions:

mkdir ~/swops-secret
ln swops-secret/id_dsa ~/swops-secret/id_dsa
chmod 0600 ~/swops-secret/id_dsa

Lithium and Cobalt both have their own dependencies for Node packages. You'll need to install them when you first clone, and then every now and then as the dependencies change. The first time you do this you will need the '-f' option to npm because the linode.api Node.js package incorrectly asserts a dependency on Node 0.4.x (but in fact works fine with later versions):

for d in lithium cobalt; do ( cd $d; npm -f install ) done

Running this when you don't need to is fine – it doesn't take very long.

Coming Back

Don't forget to sync your repositories:

for d in lithium cobalt swops swops-secret; do ( cd $d; git pull ) done

(you need to 'npm install' every now and then too, but you won't generally need to use the '-f' option (see above))

Automatically getting the correct environment with direnv

direnv can be used to automatically "activate" the environment when you enter the directory. Briefly:

# (install go and set up your GOPATH and PATH sensibly)
go get github.com/zimbatm/direnv
go install github.com/zimbatm/direnv

# append direnv setup to your bash profile
echo 'eval "$(direnv hook $0)"' >> ${HOME}/.bashrc

# Then cd to the cobalt directory and enable the .envrc with direnv:
:~$ cd sw/cobalt/
.envrc is not allowed

:~/sw/cobalt$ direnv allow
direnv: loading ~/sw/.envrc
connect-assets not found, please run npm install
direnv export: +ACK_OPTIONS +COBALT_PORT +CO_STORAGE_DIR +NODE_PATH ~PATH

Getting Started

You need to set up the environment and so on:

cd lithium
. ../swops-secret/keys.sh
. ./activate

swops-secret actually needs to be in $HOME. Do this to make sure it is.

cd ../swops-secret
./install.sh

Running Cobalt

To run cobalt locally:

cd cobalt
. ./activate
coffee code/serv.coffee

You can start and stop Cobalt on an Ubuntu server using upstart:

start cobalt
stop cobalt

Running Cobalt Tests

To run the unit tests (this starts a cobalt server on your local machine):

cd cobalt
. ./activate
mocha

Integration Tests.

You usually need to give the integration server the most recent code. The 029 hook will pull it from your local disk:

li runhook li runhook boxecutor-int-test-0 boxecutor-thin 029_copy_cobalt_from_local.l.sh
# And restart cobalt
li sh boxecutor-int-test-0 "service cobalt restart"

Or if you like you can pull from github, but this is less good, because you must have pushed to github first:

li sh boxecutor-int-test-0 "cd /opt/cobalt && git pull && service cobalt restart"

In any case to run the integration tests:

mocha integration_test

The host that is used for the integration test defaults to something hardwired in the source cod (integration_test/cobalt.coffee), but can be overridden with an environment variable:

COBALT_INTEGRATION_TEST_SERVER=boxecutor-dev-1.scraperwiki.net mocha integration_test/