🏗️Setup a Development Environment

I'd like to interject for a moment

Quick rundown

LRR is written in Perl on the server-side with the help of the Mojolicious framework, with basic JQuery on the clientside. npm is used for JavaScript dependency management and basic shortcuts, while cpanm is used for Perl dependency management.

As of v.0.5.5, a basic Client API is available for you to write clients that can connect to a LANraragi instance.

Quick setup

Once you've got a running LANraragi instance, you can basically dive right into the files to modify stuff to your needs. As you need raw access to the files, a native OS install is needed! I recommend a Linux or WSL install, as the morbo development server only works on Linux.

Said development server can be ran with the npm run dev-server command. The major difference is that this server will automatically reload when you modify any file within LANraragi. Background worker included!

You'll also probably want to enable Debug Mode in the LRR Options, as that will allow you to view debug-tier logs, alongside the raw Mojolicious logs.

Using MSYS2

The environment for development is UCRT64, other have not been tested.

Since Mojolicious and other perl dependencies are not designed to run on Windows they need to be patched. The patches can be found in tools/build/windows alongside other utility scripts.

You need to provide a redis-compatible server.

To setup an environment that can be used for development you need to do the following steps:

1. Update the environment with the pacman -Syu command.

2. cd into the LRR directory.

3. Run the script for installing native dependencies ./tools/build/windows/install-deps.sh

4. Restart the environment (close and open the shell).

5. Run the script for installing perl dependencies ./tools/build/windows/install.sh

Finally you can launch LRR with the perl ./script/launcher.pl -d -v ./script/lanraragi command.

There is no support for hot-reload, multithreading/multiprocess or a dev server. The only supported Mojo server is Daemon, this applies to development or production installs.

UTF-8 support

If you have issues with path names getting mangled you need to patch perl to enable support for UTF-8. A recent Windows SDK is required for the patching tools.

1. Open a Visual Studio developer console.

2. cd into <msys install dir>\ucrt64\bin.

3. Run the mt.exe -manifest <lrr dir>\tools\build\windows\perl.exe.manifest "-outputresource:perl.exe;#1" command.

This will tell perl to use UTF-8 mode and accept any special characters. If you update the environment you might need to patch it again.

Using Github Codespaces

The LRR Git repository contains devcontainer.json configuration for Codespaces, so you can easily spin up a development VM using that. Deployment might take some time, as the VM will download all dependencies.

Using Docker Compose

You can use Docker Compose for quickly bringing up a LANraragi instance suitable for development. Run docker compose up -d inside tools/build/docker and hack away!