On this page, you will find all the information necessary to setup your development environment in readiness for contributing to the Ushahidi codebase. For those that are already familiar with the basics of Git and Github, feel free to ignore this section...or stick around just incase you need a refresher course.

Required Software Packages

The list of required software packages is already specified here . In addition to these, you will also need to install:

• Git - for version control. Git is available for the Windows, Mac OSX and Linux platforms.

  Installation on Windows

  Download the executable from the Git website

  Installation on OS X via MacPorts

  If you're on OS X Lion, there is no need for this step as it already comes bundled with Git. However, if you're on 10.6 or other earlier version:

  $ sudo port install git

  Installation on Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint

  $ sudo apt-get install git

  Installation on Fedora/CentOS

  $ yum install git

• PHPUnit for writing and running tests. See the Writing Unit and Functional Tests section for the installation instructions

Development Tools

Other nice-to-have tools that will make your development experience less of a pain are:

• A good text editor such as Vim (for Linux enthusiasts), TextMate (for the Mac junkies), NotePad++ (for Windows slaves). These are just but a few of the common ones but feel free to use the editor of your choice.
• A graphical MySQL administration tool for administering and maintaining your database schema, running queries and doing the cool database stuff. Some of the common tools are MySQL GUI tools (available for free from the MySQL website), SequelPro for Mac and phpMyAdmin
• A graphical tool for Git just to help you visualize the commit history of the repository. By default Git comes bundled with, GitK for Linux, GitX for Mac OS X, Git GUI for all the platforms. These can be launched from the shell as follows:

  GitK

  $ gitk

  GitX

  $ gitx

  Git GUI

  $ git gui

  For Mac OS X users, there is also GitHub for mac.

NOTE: The graphical tools are only useful when you're running your development environment in GUI mode and

Git Resources and Tutorials (Listed on git-scm.com)

• The Git reference site - An online git reference
• The official Git tutorial - Good for beginners
• The Git User's Manual - a comprehensive resource that covers a lot of Git functionality
• help.github.com for a variety of Git and GitHub topics

NOTE: You can also consult the man pages for Git. These are bundled with your Git installation but are only available on Mac OS X and Linux platforms. Example:

$ man git