Resources and help for setting up a Tildes dev environment

Just wanted to offer a quick thank you for posting this. I made an account here a while ago, but after a few months stopped visiting very often.

Now that reddit is destroying itself, I came to remember that I enjoyed my time here, and stopped back to see what is happening and to see if I might be able to contribute as I am a professional software dev.

I appreciate that I was quickly able to find a post about it; thanks again.

I had trouble setting up my IDE to detect packages, as they were installed on Vagrant and not on my host machine.

Python was installed on my host, but in a more recent version than the VM so when I tried to install the packages from requirements it didn’t work.

As Im not a Python dev and I’m using PyCharm community, the Vagrant integration and ssh interpreter are not available.

What I figured out with the help of ChatGPT :

• Install Python 3.9 (python and python3.9 are both installed)
• Setup venv, using python3.9 :

python3.9 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Then I got some errors and had to install some packages like python3-dev, libluajit-5.1-dev, etc.

After that, set the local virtual environment as the interpreter in PyCharm:
Go to File > Settings > Project: <Your Project Name> > Python Interpreter.
Click on the gear icon and select Add.
In the left panel of the dialog that opens, select Virtualenv Environment.
In Location, select the venv directory you just created. Then click OK.

Has anyone been successful in getting this running on an M series apple processor? Virtualbox has limited support for it and any instance I create gets aborted. Not sure I know a way around this.

By any chance is there a way to quickly generate dummy data so I've got a more prod-like environment to make changes on? Or would I need to manually create any test data via invoke shell or the UI? Or alternatively, is there a SQL file floating out there somewhere with dummy data?

Thanks for posting this! I wish I knew Python so I could contribute on the backend (I'm a PHP guy), but maybe I'll see if there are any frontend things I can work on to help out (I'm also a JS guy!).

Tangentially related, but has anyone forked/used the Tildes source to spin up their own website yet?

I am trying to get everything set up so that I can start making contributions. I'm following the Tildes guide, although I didn't sync my fork to the official repository because I didn't understand what I was supposed to look at in the first link.

When I run vagrant up (or, more accurately, vagrant provision) everything proceeds swimmingly until

TASK [nodejs : Install npm packages defined in package.json] *******************

At which point I get the following failure message (I have spaced it out to make it easier to read):

fatal: [default]: FAILED! =>
{"changed": false,
"cmd": "/usr/bin/npm ci --no-bin-links",

"msg": "npm WARN prepare removing existing node_modules/ before installation\nnpm ERR! code EPROTO\nnpm ERR! syscall symlink\nnpm ERR! path ../semver/bin/semver\nnpm ERR! dest /opt/tildes/node_modules/.bin/semver\nnpm ERR! errno -71\nnpm ERR! EPROTO: protocol error, symlink '../semver/bin/semver' -> '/opt/tildes/node_modules/.bin/semver'\n\nnpm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:\nnpm ERR! /home/vagrant/.npm/_logs/2023-09-10T00_56_41_305Z-debug.log",

"rc": 185,

"stderr": "npm WARN prepare removing existing node_modules/ before installation\nnpm ERR! code EPROTO\nnpm ERR! syscall symlink\nnpm ERR! path ../semver/bin/semver\nnpm ERR! dest /opt/tildes/node_modules/.bin/semver\nnpm ERR! errno -71\nnpm ERR! EPROTO: protocol error, symlink '../semver/bin/semver' -> '/opt/tildes/node_modules/.bin/semver'\n\nnpm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:\nnpm ERR! /home/vagrant/.npm/_logs/2023-09-10T00_56_41_305Z-debug.log\n",

"stderr_lines": ["npm WARN prepare removing existing node_modules/ before installation",
"npm ERR! code EPROTO",
"npm ERR! syscall symlink",
"npm ERR! path ../semver/bin/semver",
"npm ERR! dest /opt/tildes/node_modules/.bin/semver",
"npm ERR! errno -71",
"npm ERR! EPROTO: protocol error, symlink '../semver/bin/semver' -> '/opt/tildes/node_modules/.bin/semver'",
"",
"npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:",
"npm ERR!     /home/vagrant/.npm/_logs/2023-09-10T00_56_41_305Z-debug.log"],
"stdout": "", "stdout_lines": []}

I get that this has to do with NPM not working inside vagrant, but I can't figure out what to do. My assumption is that it is trying to run /usr/bin/npm ci --no-bin-links from inside Vagrant but I can't tell how I can either fix or work around this. I tried running npm install --no-bin-links; that gave me the following:

npm WARN saveError ENOENT: no such file or directory, open 'C:\Users\Peter\OneDrive\Tildes\tildes\package.json'
npm notice created a lockfile as package-lock.json. You should commit this file.
npm WARN enoent ENOENT: no such file or directory, open 'C:\Users\Peter\OneDrive\Tildes\tildes\package.json'
npm WARN tildes No description
npm WARN tildes No repository field.
npm WARN tildes No README data
npm WARN tildes No license field.

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I'm totally lost with this. I vaguely understand what it's trying to do, but I have no clue what I need to do. Perhaps I should have changed some settings when I was installing VirtualBox or VagrantAny help would be greatly appreciated.