I haven't settled on a comfortable/flexible/quick development environment for hacking on ikiwiki. The VM I host my web pages on is not fast enough to use for RAD and ikiwiki. For developing plugins, it seems a bit heavy-weight to clone the entire ikiwiki repository. I haven't managed to get into a habit of running a cloned version of ikiwiki from it's own dir, rather than installing it (If that's even possible). The ikiwiki site source (source ./doc) is quite large and not a great testbed for hacking (e.g. if you are working on a plugin you need a tailored test suite for that plugin).
Does anyone have a comfortable setup or tips they would like to share? -- [[Jon]]
I've just been setting libdir in an existing wiki's setup file. When the plugin's in a decent state, I copy it over to a git checkout and commit. For the plugins I've been working on (auth and VCS), this has been just fine. Are you looking for something more? --[[schmonz]]
I think this suffers from two problems. Firstly, unless you are tracking git
master in your existing wiki, there's the possibility that your plugin will
not work with a more modern version of ikiwiki (or that it would benefit
from using a newly added utility subroutine or similar).
Unlikely. I don't make changes to the plugin interface that break
existing plugins. (Might change non-exported IkiWiki:: things
from time to time.) --[[Joey]]
Second, sometimes I
find that even writing a plugin can involve making minor changes outside of
the plugin code (bug fixes, or moving functionality about). So, I think
having some kind of environment built around a git checkout is best.
However, this does not address the issue of the tedium writing/maintaining a
setup file for testing things.
I think I might personally benefit from a more consistent environment (I
move from machine-to-machine frequently). -- [[Jon]]
If you set libdir to point to a checkout of ikiwiki's git repository,
it will override use of the installed version of ikiwiki, so ikiwiki will
immediatly use any changed or new .pm files (with the exception of
IkiWiki.pm), and you can use git to manage it all without an installation
step. If I am modifying IkiWiki.pm, I generally symlink it from
/usr/share/perl5/IkiWiki.pm to my git reporisitory. Granted, not ideal.
I often use my laptop's local version of my personal wiki for testing.
It has enough stuff that I can easily test most things, and if I need
a test page I just dump test cases on the sandbox. I can make
any changes necessary during testing and then git reset --hard origin/master to avoid publishing them.
If the thing I'm testing involves templates, or underlays,
I will instead use ikiwiki's docwiki.setup for testing, modifying it as
needed, since it is preconfigured to use the templates and underlays
from ikiwiki's source repository.
--[[Joey]]
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