Getting Started

1. Build Development Environment

Get your virtual machine up-and-running by visiting the developer’s getting started page.

2. Submit App Request

To submit your App request, tell us about the App you’re interested in building and our team can help launch and provision your own personal application development environment.

3. Create a Project

1. Using the url provided in the previous step (“Submit App Request”), open the dashboard.  
2. Click on the “Create Project” button from the dashboard.  Provide the name of your project and then click “Submit”.  A project skeleton will be generated and provided for you to download.
3. You should now see the project you created in the dashboard

Working with a New Project

1. Click on the title of your project in the dashboard
   • You will see the current revision (changeset) of the project, its last modified date, and an initial commit message.  The project has been created using the Mercurial source control management tool.  
2. You can now download and work with your new project by using a mercurial “clone” command using the link below the “Revision” column of your table: hg clone http://my.roundtrip.url/cgi-bin/hgweb/test
   • This will download your project to your local computer so that you can immediately begin working with them.

Project Structure

The files are structured so that you, as a developer, can have the greatest flexibility in developing your project while still dividing your application logic into useful categories.

At the top-level, there are two folders, “client” and “server”, as well as a project configuration file.

• Within the client folder, you may include images, CSS stylesheets, javascript files, or anything else that you’d like to serve to the user’s web browser.  
• On the server side, you may include your Django models, views, tests, as well as any other python code or executable that you’d like to call from the web server.  
• Finally, within the server directory, there is a folder for Django database migrations as well as Django HTML templates that you can use for customizing the look and feel of your project’s GIS/Analysis page

Editing Project Code

Edit these files in your local development environment.  When you are ready to submit your changes, you will perform mercurial “commit” and “push” commands to update your roundtrip instance.

We recommend making numerous small commits to make finding any syntax errors easier.

hg commit -m “my local changes”

hg push

Once these commands are performed, the project will automatically deploy your changes, to the instance created in the first step. Once you have setup an account and logged into eRAMS, you can create a new project using the “test” project template you generated through the dashboard.