Interchange + CVS HOWTO: Workstation Interchange installation

6.1. Workstation Interchange installation

Not all developers work on Linux workstations, many use Apples (graphics designers and HTML gurus tend to, I've found), and many use Windows. This means that many developers have the extra step of uploading their changes to a Unix server where Interchange is running in order to see their changes.

The remedy to that is to setup an Interchange server on your workstation, or any location that has direct access to the CVS source files. I'll explain:

The Interchange server that runs where the CVS server is (that we setup earlier) can be seen as the gathering point for all the developers. However, each developer may run as many Interchange daemons as he/she requires in a local context for the purpose of seeing the changes made before uploading them via CVS.

For example, Bob could setup another Interchange catalog on the same server as the CVS, (e.g. foundation-bob). To get direct access to those files (rather than FTP), Bob could use NFS mounts (if Bob's workstation is Linux) or SMB mounts using Samba if his workstation is a Windows variant. Any way that Bob can get direct access to the files will save him some time (by cutting out the "upload" from the "edit->upload->test" development cycle). One could even use VMware to run a Linux server on your Windows workstation.

Note: You can now use the cygwin compatibility confirmed in Interchange versions 4.7.6 and above to run Interchange right on your Windows workstation.

The result will be that you can modify the files with your favorite text editor and see the results immediately through your local catalog. Setting up the catalog initially is quite easy. Just follow the same steps used to setup the CVS catalog. Which is:

Checkout from CVS into a new CVS catalog directory and link the images/ directory.
Make localized configuration modifications. I recommend creating a config/local.cfg file and then include it at the top of catalog.cfg, with the contents of:

Variable CGI_URL        /cgi-bin/foundation
Variable SERVER testserver
Variable SECURE_ENABLE  0
Variable IMAGE_DIR      /foundation/images

Restart Interchange.

You may need to remove all *.sql files from the products directory, to create all of the database files again. Additionally, you may need to create the database, username/password for your database again as well.

You will need to recreate any symbolic links that previously existed, such as templates/default -> templates/foundation

Another thing that you might have noticed at this point is all the files that are modified locally by the Interchange daemon will report ? or M when you run an update. To fix this, see CVSIGNORE.