Quick Reminders

I've started a new project. Quite a big one. In just the set up phase there were many challenges, not to mention the ones that came during the actual development. However, I have a lot of help from an experienced developer, which certainly makes the problem solving and debugging easier!

I want to just mention a few of the sticking points that I remember (for sure there are many that I've forgotten). The initial set up was not easy. I remember that when I tried to launch the set up myself I had a variety of issues. One thing I had to fix was to enable virtualisation on my machine. This is accomplished my accessing your BIOS and manually changing it there. This process can be found online/youtube. It was very interesting because it feels like old-school comp stuff.

Next was the fact that they use vagrant to create a consistent virtual environment across all their projects/team's machines. So I too had to set up this environment. The challenge was that I was on a Windows machine and the rest were using Linux.

The two major sticking points here were the Vagrantfile and the CRLF vs LF. So after much trial and error, we figured out that there was a command in the Vagrantfile (which is basically vagrant's config file) which caused a crash in 'vagrant up'. It would stop on the private key section. Luckily this command was not absolutely necessary to the program:

config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
    Disable log creation on vagrant up
    v.customize [ "modifyvm", :id, "--uartmode1", "disconnected" ]
  end

We commented it out and vagrant could create new private keys automatically.
Next step was a strange error while trying to download the base files. It would happen every time. A few searches lead me to believe it might be a GIT CRLF vs LF problem. When you install GIT you get an option whether to change LF to CRLF for Windows readability. Since everyone else was on Linux machines they hadn't encountered this issue. I had obviously selected the wrong option on install. Thankfully it could easily be changed in the the console.

With these issues fixed I was up and running.