Help: Starting the application locally

[aronsonben]

Hi,

I am looking to explore the UrbanOS platform on my personal machine and am following the wiki to get started but am having trouble getting the application running. I have setup my machine with the correct requirements but it seems like that guide may be a bit out of date as I'm not sure specifically which steps to follow. I have attempted to build the docker containers, follow each microservice README, and used different versions of Elixir + Erlang but am still a tad confused. Please forgive me if I am missing steps, I am a bit new to working with applications like this.

Could someone please point me in the right direction for how I can get the platform running or where might be a better place to ask this question?

Looking forward to getting it working! :)

[bmitchinson]

Thanks for reaching out Ben!

I've updated the wiki to reflect some more recent documentation updates. From now on we'll be maintaining the public facing wiki a bit more regularly, instead of internal docs.

The setup guide now has updated instructions on installing the correct versions of erlang and elixir. I'd recommend uninstalling any languages previously installed from prior instructions before trying again. Especially if they were installed by brew. Here's the setup link. It's at the same location, but has been significantly updated.

Additionally, here's how to configure VSCode as an IDE for smartcitiesdata

And a guide that's in progress, on how to run a majority of the system all at once. I expect that guide be finished by the middle of next week. Setting up Andi and an Auth0 configuration for it can take some time. You could skip andi and send kafka messages to individual services, or run tests to learn about their functionality, by referencing the readme of individual apps.

Are you on Mac? Most of our setup guide is written with mac in mind, but as mentioned in the setup docs, a lot should be possible with Windows Linux Subsystem. If you find alternative windows setup methods, I'd be happy to add them to the wiki if they're described in detail.

[aronsonben]

Hi Ben (great name), thanks so much for your help! I do run on Mac with the Apple Silicon chip and have followed your updated docs.

I was able to successfully get the app to compile via Elixir using your new instructions. I also setup my VS Code to work as an IDE. A quick note on the 'Run' guide:

There is no file whole-system.yml as per Step 2 in the instructions, though replacing with docker-compose.yml eventually worked. I am running on the Apple M1 chip so also had issues building some of the images. I followed the suggestion at this Stack Overflow thread by adding platform: linux/amd64 to all services in apps/e2e/test/docker-compose.yml except init and kafka and eventually did get it working! I just went through several of the main application READMEs and am starting to poke around with testing.

Thank you again for your help. Will update here if I run into anything else blocking me from getting this going.

[bmitchinson]

Awesome! We actually just noticed that earlier this morning and patched that, so feel free to discard your changes and see if ours work as intended: https://github.com/UrbanOS-Public/smartcitiesdata/pull/1472/files