Prerequisites

Clone the repo (obviously) from https://github.com/csesoc/chaos. To be able to contribute properly without making your own fork, you’ll need to be added to the Chaos GitHub team. This should be done for you in the coming weeks. You’ll need 2FA enabled on your GitHub account as it’s a requirement for the CSESoc organisation.

I assume you all already know to do this, but clone the repo with SSH not HTTPS, and use an SSH key.

If you’re on MacOS, I recommend you use homebrew to install tools needed. If you’re on Windows, I recommend using WSL.

The Vault

CSESoc uses Bitwarden (using a self-hosted Vaultwarden instance), a secure password manager, which can also act as a secrets sharer. We use it to store our backend environment files that you’ll need to run Chaos locally. You do not already have an account by default on this.

• Sign up for an account at https://vault.csesoc.org.au using your CSESoc email

• Ask @Jared Lohtaja (Unlicensed) (you can find him in the dev discord) for access to the vault, sending him the email address you signed up with

• You should receive an invite via email with a link to accept it, and once you do, Jared will have to confirm again on his end

• Once you’re confirmed you should see CSESoc Development and all its items in your home/vaults page, one of them being CHAOS backend .env file. This is what you need

Open

Backend

This is the most involved part of the setup process. A lot of this is from the README in the backend folder in the repo.

• Install the Rust toolchain using Rustup

• Install PostgreSQL (e.g., sudo apt install postgresql-all, brew install postgresql, sudo pacman -S postgresql, etc)

• Download the backend .env file from the vault as shown in the previous section into the root of the backend folder in the repo

• Setup postgres

  • Guide for Arch Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PostgreSQL#Initial_configuration, ignore section 4 onwards (should be similar on other Linux distributions/WSL)

  • Guide for MacOS: https://www.sqlshack.com/setting-up-a-postgresql-database-on-mac/

  • Windows: just use WSL please

  • Create a user named postgres with the password equal to the one in the .env file

    • You can get it from the DATABASE_URL field (format postgres://postgres:<password>@localhost/chaos)

  • People have often had trouble setting up postgres properly in the past, if you’re having trouble you can ask on Discord/in VC and hopefully one of us can help you

• Install diesel-cli with cargo install diesel_cli --no-default-features --features postgres

• Run diesel setup && diesel migration run

  • If you get a server connection error, check out this stackoverflow thread

  • this might delete code in the backend, make sure to restore any deletions (this has never happened for me, but it’s in the readme 🤷)

• Run the server with cargo run --bin server

  • The first startup will likely take a while as it compiles everything

  • If you want to run the server and get it to restart upon changes, you can install cargo watch with cargo install cargo-watch

  • Then, run cargo watch -x 'run --bin server' instead

  • It will watch files and continually re-compile upon changes

Scripts

Scripts should be run from the chaos/backend directory:

• scripts/seed.sh - will wipe your database and add some dummy data

  • If you are getting a bad variable nameread answer error, ensure the file has LF-style newlines

  • You should run this script first after setting up the database, assuming you want some data to start off with

  • Again, this will wipe your database so do NOT run it if you have data in there that you want to keep, but this should only be used in local development environments, so there likely isn’t

• scripts/become_super_user- will prompt for the email address to turn into a GLOBAL super user

  • Run this script after running the above script and creating an account

  • This will give you admin perms in every organisation, useful for testing, and also you need to be a superuser to create an organisation

Frontend

This setup is a lot more straightforward than the backend

• (Optionally) install nvm, and run nvm use inside the frontend folder to ensure a consistent Node version

  • Or just install Node, most reasonably modern versions should work fine, but if you want to guarantee consistency use nvm

• Install yarn. We use 1.x currently

  • If you’re on Arch, you can sudo pacman -S yarn

• Run yarn to install dependencies

  • Run yarn again whenever you pull changes that update dependencies (if you see package.json or yarn.lock changed when you git pull, or checkout a branch with changes in those files)

• Run yarn start to start the dev server

• If shit hits the fan with dependency changes and you’re getting weird errors that probably shouldn’t be happening (and running yarn again doesn’t fix it), you can try rm -rf node_modules and reinstalling the dependencies with yarn lmao

• Frontend Editor Setup

Staging

You can access the staging deployment here: https://chaos.csesoc.app/

• Whenever a commit is pushed to the main branch (including PRs getting merged), the backend and frontend automatically get built and deployed to the staging environment

• To become a superuser here, an existing superuser needs to do it for you

  • Create an account and then send the email you used to @Michael Vo (Unlicensed) to make you a superuser