Create documentation for building on a local machine

[sinistersnare]

Hey, I am on a windows machine on my laptop, and would like to contribute, I have been surveying the source code for dependencies and I think i will be able to publish a list of requirements.This will include the contents of pip freeze, and perhaps a vagrant install script? This way there can be reproducible deploys, which would be super easy for local testing.

Ideas?

[svanellewee]

@sinistersnare have you had any progress on this?

I've only just started looking at this repo, but I don't think cross platform functionality has been considered yet.

Problems I see are

• the dash scripts for calling rust.. I've made mine bash, you would need a batch equivalent? Perhaps we can just make them python as well to make it properly cross platform?
• playpen C-dependency seems to require a whole lot of work to get going locally, perhaps we can deactivate it if this is not running on a "production" environment.. though how would we know when we're on production?

I've made a diff of what I tried to do to make it work on my BSD based system..it's not really PR worthy material but might help indicate where we can start?

https://github.com/svanellewee/rust-playpen/compare/f886864dc754b52c0284c537b4aef6e499b59ab6...svanellewee:master

[sinistersnare]

Ive actually completely forgotten about this :) School was really busy right after I wrote this issue.

If you want to take the reigns on this please do, I think having clear cut dependencies and venv setup would be amazing.

Thanks so much for your work! Sorry that I am so lazy :p

[edunham]

@sinistersnare, @svanellewee Welcome! It's great to start getting other contributors to the infrastructure involved, and I'm sure you'll find all kinds of previously-unnoticed bugs (especially missing documentation) by building a copy of it yorself!

The possibly bad news is that it's not possible to build rust-playpen on any platform other than Linux with systemd right now, because of the underlying Playpen sandboxing tool's requirements. It actually only builds on Arch at the moment, due to some assumptions in init.sh about the availability of Arch-specific scripts, but I'm working on making it run on Ubuntu in order to get the special Arch snowflake out of Rust's production infrastructure. I'll also document the dependencies as I go along -- the end result will be an Ansible playbook that you can point at an Ubuntu box, run, and end up with a working rust-playpen installation.

@sinistersnare, I think the best bet for making progress on this right now would be to spin up an Arch VM by following instructions like these.

[sinistersnare]

Yeah I figured it would only run on Arch, thats what the creator uses. I made the issue so that we can be aware that we should document things like that.

I tihnk we need a couple things so we can have reproducible builds:

1. Vagrant usage
2. requirements.txt
3. a useful section in the README.

I am fine with only being able to run on Arch, but the fact that it was not documented is a problem.

[edunham]

Documented the IRC bot setup in #132. Haven't documented webserver or init.sh stuff yet.