Installing A* on OpenBSD

The simplest way to get started is to run the following command in a fresh install of OpenBSD.

ftp -o - http://localhost:4317/install.sh | sh

INSTALL - bootstrapping A*

This section describes the initial setup of A* in a user account.

Preparation: machine setup

1. Setup an OpenBSD machine using either a standard OpenBSD install (see platform-openbsd-laptop) or a virtual machine (see platform-openbsd-vm).
2. Add a user account noting the username will be the same as your A* user identifier. Do not use use spaces or other symbols please.
3. Set the shell to bash
4. Ensure the password is strong and remote access is limited.

Preparation: A* account setup

Contact an A* Administrator (Phil for now) and provide:

1. Username - note that we need to keep these unique
2. Proposed roles/purpose, e.g.
   • a-team member
   • a-user member
   • etc..
3. Note that each component has its own set of roles for each user, e.g.
   • davem: developer access to all components.
   • dennis: read and ticketting access to all components.

The system provides a fine grained set of roles/capabilities (see RBAC) but in general we use:

developer - able to read and write a component.

reader - read only access to a component.

manager - read only access plus the ability to read/write Tickets, Forum, etc.

Create working directory

Create a working directory, typically:

% mkdir ~/as

Note that you can have more than 1 working directory but you will need to update the variables we set in the next two sections.

Setup .profile

Add the following paths where as is your working directory.

export ASTAR=$HOME/as
export PATH=$ASTAR/bin:$PATH
export MANPATH=$ASTAR/man:$MANPATH

Setup .bashrc

You may want to update your setup with a few aliases.

alias make=gmake
alias f=fossil
alias c="fossil commit"
alias d="fossil gdiff --tk --tclsh /usr/local/bin/tclsh8.6"
alias r="d;c;t"

Setup the initial working and clone

We need to install a-clone to do the initial cloning/copying of the components. a-clone is implemented as a standalone program that specifically does not depend on any of the other A* components.

% cd $ASTAR
% pwd
% mkdir -p bin lib share man sbin include
% f clone https://$USER@a-star-microgrid.com/as/components/a-clone
% cd a-clone
% make install

The simplest case of cloning all components you have access to is:

% a-clone

This will download each component and setup component-name.fossil which is the fossil repository database and component-name containing the actual checked out version.

Using A* locally

TODO

1. Describe FOSSIL_USER variable
2. Describe ASTAR_PASSWORD variable
3. Bin/lib/… packager - rather than use the direct components we could make up meta components that setup bin/lib/… so that everyone doesn’t need access to the source components.